Agentic commerce, and the protocols behind it
AI agents are starting to discover products, build carts and pay on a buyer's behalf. A handful of new standards make that possible.
Here's a brief guide about what agentic commerce is, the protocols involved, and where things stand today.
Current as of July 2026
What is agentic commerce?
In agentic commerce, a customer delegates a shopping task to an AI agent, and the agent carries it out end to end: it finds the right products across one or more merchants, assembles a cart, and completes payment, often without the buyer clicking through a traditional website at all. The commerce journey no longer just starts at a search box or a merchants homepage or mobile app; it can also start in WhatsApp or via a conversation in ChatGPT or Gemini.
For that to work safely, three questions need answering at machine speed: how does the agent discover what a merchant sells, how does it transact and check out, and how does everyone prove the customer actually authorised the purchase? Different protocols have emerged to solve each of those layers.
A stack, not a format war
The protocols to consider
The main standards shaping agentic commerce today, and what each actually does.
Defines how an agent runs a full checkout against a merchant's payment provider, keeping the merchant as merchant of record. It powered ChatGPT's in-chat purchases; OpenAI has since shifted toward discovery and hand-off to retailer apps, but the protocol itself remains in use.
Covers the whole journey from discovery, cart, pricing and tax, payment and post-purchase, and powers buying inside Google's Gemini channel. Open-source, with broad retailer backing; merchants publish a profile and expose their catalog.
The trust layer. It uses signed 'mandates', cryptographic proof of what the customer authorised (what, how much, for how long), so a network or merchant can verify the agent had real authority, not just a stored credential.
Not a commerce protocol as such: it's the standard way an agent connects to a server to read data and call tools. In commerce it's how an agent reads a product catalog or calls a merchant's API before it ever transacts.
A messaging standard for agents talking to other agents, e.g., a buyer's assistant negotiating with a merchant's agent. Shared plumbing used across the other camps rather than a competing checkout standard.
Dataiera has demonstrated an A2A live booking process for a flight using open standard A2A protocols (DIDCom).
The card networks' own agent-payment infrastructure, Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa Intelligent Commerce which identify the paying agent and clear transactions on the rails merchants already use. Mastercard's Verifiable Intent and Visa's VCI provide full customer intent that enable autonomous agent process.
Where things stand
- •No single winner. The industry expects agentic commerce to be multi-protocol for the foreseeable future, the major card networks and processors have committed to supporting several at once.
- •The trust layer is consolidating. AP2 and Mastercard's Verifiable Intent have moved to the FIDO Alliance — the body that standardised passkeys — pushing authorisation toward a shared, vendor-neutral standard.
- •Discovery is proving out faster than in-chat checkout. Early in-chat purchase experiments saw low conversion, so several platforms now lean on the assistant for discovery and hand the final checkout to the retailer.
- •Merchant of record stays with the merchant. Across the standards, the merchant keeps ownership of the order, tax, fulfilment and refunds — the protocols move the order and confirmation, not the liability.
One integration across every protocol
Because there's no single standard, keeping up with all of them is a moving target. Dataiera is the orchestration and translation layer that sits across the stack: we take your catalog and connect it to the discovery, checkout and payment protocols agents use, ACP, UCP, AP2, MCP and A2A, with agentic payment rails built in and merchant of record maintained.
As new standards emerge, we keep you current, so you stay compatible with every agentic channel through one integration.
Ready for agentic commerce?
We'll map a clear path from your catalog to live agentic commerce across every channel.
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