Universal Commerce Protocol
A shared standard, developed by Shopify and Google, that lets AI agents browse shops and complete purchases in a consistent way.
When an AI assistant buys something for you, it has to talk to the shop somehow. Doing that by clicking through a website built for humans is fragile and easy to get wrong. The Universal Commerce Protocol is an attempt at the alternative: an agreed set of rules for how an agent asks what a shop sells, confirms what the buyer actually wanted, and pays.
It is designed to be shared rather than owned, so assistants from several companies can use the same standard, and it includes checks on which agents are allowed to act at all. Whether it becomes the standard or one of several competing ones is still open, and the companies that own both the shop and the customer have little reason to join in.