Protocols to enable agentic commerce keep coming.
Google introduced a new “universal commerce protocol” on Sunday aimed at smoothing digital agents’ interactions when people turn into potential shoppers during their AI chat sessions.
The standard – developed with several major retailers, including Shopify, Target and Walmart – “establishes a common language for agents and systems to operate together,” Google said in a Sunday blog post.
The protocol has been endorsed by about 20 major payments players, including Adyen, PayPal Holdings, Stripe, Worldpay, Mastercard and Visa, Google said.
The chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, joined Walmart’s incoming CEO, John Furner, for the announcement Sunday at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show conference in New York City.
The protocol will “soon” allow shoppers using Google’s AI mode in search, or its Gemini AI app, to purchase items directly from retailers such as Best Buy, Lowe’s and Walmart, the search giant said. Initial transactions will be with Google Pay using payment and shipping information in a shopper’s Google wallet, followed by PayPal as a payment method.
“In the coming months, we’ll work with retailers to expand globally and add more capabilities — like discovering related products, applying loyalty rewards, and powering custom shopping experiences on Google,” Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president of ads and commerce, wrote in the blog post.
The solution brings retailing into Google’s AI research functions much the way that OpenAI and Stripe announced a partnership in September to enable commerce directly from ChatGPT sessions.
Google’s protocol is also designed to streamline the operations of what’s likely to be numerous digital agents across the retail landscape. “Instead of requiring unique connections for every individual agent, UCP enables all agents to interact easily,” Google said in its post.
The open source protocol will also work across industry verticals and with existing agentic AI standards, such as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol and Model Context Protocol from AI firm Anthropic.
Google’s AP2 protocol will surface merchants’ products within AI conversations and will “be used in tandem with UCP in the future to enable agentic purchases where an agent can purchase something on a user’s behalf,” a Google spokesperson said Monday in an email.
Over the past year, many payments companies, including Visa and Mastercard, have also rolled out new initiatives to enable agentic commerce, as have artificial intelligence firms and retailers.
Automated shopping tools will presumably boost sales for merchants, potentially increasing the volume of fees for payment card issuers and networks. Agentic commerce could also better personalize the retail experience and reduce transaction friction.
Yet the flood of agentic protocols has overwhelmed many merchants that don’t have the technology resources of major national chains, John Lunn, the CEO of payments orchestration startup Gr4vy said Monday in an interview. Orchestrators provide technology to let retailers access multiple payment gateways, processors and other service providers without having to build direct connections themselves.
“Some of them are pretty underbaked, frankly, a certain amount of PR versus product,” Lunn said of the emerging protocols. “Merchants haven’t got the money to invest heavily in new technology if there’s any risk that it’s going to fail.”
