Challenge

Since 2023, Decagon’s AI agents have helped businesses deliver an efficient, elevated customer experience at scale by making decisions and acting on them autonomously. Decagon teaches its agents how to respond to complex issues and execute multistep workflows—all while providing greater transparency on how the AI makes those decisions relative to traditional AI models.

In 2024, one of the companies that uses Decagon’s AI agents requested help with subscription cancellations and refunds. Decagon’s founders realized they needed a payment partner that could deliver the tools that would allow its AI agents to access the necessary billing and invoicing information to help customers manage their subscriptions, access invoices, deliver refunds, and more.

“When a lot of customers are asking about subscriptions, it ends up taking a lot of time for a company’s human support agents to look this information up,” said Gram Liu, a member of technical staff at Decagon.

Through Decagon’s novel approach of Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), businesses can effectively teach their AI agents to address any potential new workflow processes. But enabling targeted access to billing and invoicing information can be a long, involved process that requires substantial engineering resources. It would be a challenge to develop the initial workflows, as well as adjust and improve them going forward. Ideally, any payment partner would be one already used by many of its customers, and one that would also offer tools and features that Decagon could use as its platform evolved.

Solution

The business that asked Decagon for help in 2024 was already using Stripe to handle and process its payments. “Because this business was already on Stripe, it was very clear that working with Stripe was the right path for us to take,” said Liu.

Decagon integrated the Stripe API directly into its platform. This approach allowed Decagon AI agents to connect securely to a business’s Stripe account with just an API key. With that connection, the agents can access an individual customer’s billing or payment details as needed to respond to issues raised during a chat, email, or voice interaction. Decagon’s developers were able to leverage Stripe’s comprehensive documentation to integrate the API quickly and easily.

Now, businesses that contract with Decagon and that also use Stripe Billing only need to share their Stripe API key to provide access to their Billing system. Decagon’s AI agents can then connect securely to the business’s Stripe data to act on customer requests—such as cancelling a subscription autonomously—without having to escalate the request to a human agent.

With this functionality up and running, Decagon was able to respond quickly when other businesses requested workflows that would support customer inquiries about invoicing.

Results

Stripe-enabled agentic workflow developed in one week with one engineer

When the first business requested subscription support from Decagon, a single Decagon engineer working with the business’s team was able to deliver a fully functional agentic workflow within one week. The same process with another payment processor might have taken a few months. “Legacy payment providers tend to have much longer integration processes,” said Liu.

Stripe API integration helps Decagon improve customer service outcomes and reduce costs

One agentic workflow enabled by the Stripe API has driven a 167% increase in the customer deflection rate—the number of customer interactions that are handled by an AI agent rather than a human agent—for one subscription-based business. For another business, Decagon has reduced costs for customer support operations by 65%.

“Subscriptions are a clear opportunity for our AI agents to handle these types of inquiries autonomously through Stripe,” said Liu.

Straightforward and comprehensive Stripe API allows for easy expansion of AI workflows

Since integrating the Stripe API, adding new workflows has become even faster and easier for Decagon’s team. For instance, a business might initially want AI agents to assess customer eligibility for a refund based on a set of established criteria. Once that workflow has been proven effective and accurate, the business might then decide to expand the AI workflow to include issuing the refund itself.

The combination of Decagon’s AOPs and the efficient Stripe API means that the business just has to increase the scope of its existing Stripe API key or provision a new one. As a result, Decagon can easily expand its AI agents’ capabilities in response to business needs.

Today, a growing percentage of Decagon’s businesses are already on Stripe. That gives Decagon a strong platform for growth as it continues to evolve its AI agents’ capabilities.

“With a lot of the improvements we build into our platform today, we can get them up and running within just a few hours thanks to the Stripe API,” said Liu. “Now that we’ve figured it out, incremental changes are a lot faster.”