When Walmart and Openee announced that retailer Chat would integrate with GPT, the question became how quickly Openee could deliver on its promise of agents buying things for people. In the battle for AI-enabled commerce, getting agents to securely complete transactions is the biggest hurdle.
More and more, chat platforms like Chat are GPT Replacing browsers And to be very good at surfacing information in search of people. Customers will ask ChatGPT for the best humidifier on the market, and when the model returns results, people have no choice but to click on the item link and complete the online purchase.
AI agents, as yet, do not have the ability or trust infrastructure to make people and banking institutions feel safe enough to lose someone’s cash. Enterprises and other industry players understand that, in order to allow agents to pay for purchases, a common language must be shared between the model and the agent providers, the bank, the merchant, and, to some extent, the buyer.
And so, over the past few weeks, three competing agentic commerce standards have emerged: Google announced Agent Pay Protocol (AP2) With partners including PayPal, American Express, Mastercard, Salesforce and ServiceNow. soon, Open Eye And strip Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and this week only, Visa Launched Trusted Agent Protocol (tap)
All of these protocols aim to give agents the trust layer they need to convince banks and their customers that their money is safe in the hands of the AI agent. But it can also create walled gardens, which shows how immature agentic commerce really is. This is one The problem is that enterprises can bet on a chat platform and agentic payment protocol that operates instead of collaboratively.
How are they different?
Recommending several standards for athletes is not new. It usually takes years for the industry to gather around a single standard, or even figure out a way to harmonize the different protocols used. However, the pace of innovation in the enterprise moved the needle on that.
Quite quickly, MCP became the de facto channel for identifying device usage, and most companies began setting up or connecting to MCP servers. (Clearly, this isn’t a standard yet) But having three different possible standards can slow the process down a bit, because it’s hard to converge on a single standard when there are so many to choose from.
The purpose of these protocols is to prove authorization. Both AP2 and TAP rely on cryptographic evidence to identify an agent. For taps, agents are added to an approved list and receive a digital key identifying them. AP2 uses a digital contract that acts as a proxy for human approval for the agent. OpenAI’s ACP does not require much infrastructure change, where the ACP essentially acts as a courier for the merchant as the agent relays information to the merchant.
Walled gardens
These three protocols ideally work across different chat platforms, but this is never guaranteed, especially when your biggest chat platform competitor has its own protocol. One risk with competing protocols is that they can create walled gardens, where they only work on certain platforms.
Enterprises face the problem of being locked into one platform and agent payment standards that won’t interfere with another. Organizations not only receive the product recommended by the agent, but are also often the merchant of record and need to trust that the agent contacting them is acting on behalf of a customer.
Luis Amira, cofounder and CEO of agent commerce startup Circuit and Chine, told VentureBeat that while this creates an opportunity for companies in an interoperability layer like this, it can be confusing for enterprises.
“The better the protocol proposals, the more likely they are to become walled gardens and very difficult to interoperability,” Amira said. “We suspect they’re going to be fighting it for the next few years, and the more they fight it, the more you’re going to need someone to sit underneath it all.”
Unlike the Internet, where anyone can use any browser to access a website, thanks in large part to the TCP/IP standard, chat platforms remain very isolated. I mostly use ChatGPT (because it’s installed on my laptop and I don’t need to open a new tab), so when I want to see how Gemini will handle my query, I have to actually open Gemini to do it.
The number of protocol proposals indicates how far we are from enabling shopping agents. The industry still needs to decide which standards to leave behind, and no matter how many Walmarts integrate with ChatGPT, it’s all too much if people don’t trust the model or agent to handle their cash.
Hope to get the best features
The best thing for businesses to do for now is to experiment with all the protocols and hope that a winner emerges. Ultimately, there may be an agent commerce protocol that works best in each proposition.
For Wayne Liu, chief growth officer and president of the U.S. at Perfect Corp., multiple protocol proposals only mean more education.
“That’s where open source is important because it’s going to be the driving force to bring everything together,” Liu said.
Of course, the next couple of weeks will be interesting to watch if there are only three competing agentic commerce protocols. However, there are some major retailers and chat platforms that can still throw a wrench into the whole thing.