Google, Partners Standardize AI Transactions Through Open-Source Commerce Spec

Google this week detailed an open-source protocol designed to enable agentic commerce at scale.

If the company and its impressive array of partners – including Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and Target – successfully drive the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to broad-based acceptance and adoption, it should emerge as an analog to the widely used Model Context Protocol (MCP) that enables connectivity between agents and a wide range of data sources. In addition, WalMart announced this week it’s working with Google on shopping experiences that are accessible directly within Google Gemini using UCP.

American Express, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa are among the financial firms backing UCP.

UCP is another area where Google is asserting AI leadership: it previously announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) for securing AI-driven payments. In fact the company’s cloud and AI leadership has vaulted Google to the #1 spot in the Cloud Wars Top 10 by Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans.

UCP’s Functions

In detailing the functions of UCP, Google noted that consumer expectations are moving toward seamless transitions from reviewing products in a research phase all the way through to purchase, so systems and agents need to support real-time inventory checks, dynamic pricing, and real-time transactions in the course of — and within — users’ conversations.

Integration challenges impede this frictionless end-to-end process, however, and UCP is designed to address the current shortcomings with:

• Unified integration: creating a single integration point for all consumer devices and interfaces while eliminating current complexity
• Shared language: standardizes discovery, capability schema, and data transport for cross-platform interoperability on an end-to-end basis
• Extensibility: an extensions framework is designed to accommodate new agentic experiences as they emerge and anticipates expansion across new vertical industries
• Secure underpinnings: provides tokenized payments and verifiable credentials as agents communicate with back-end systems such as shopping carts

By reducing integration complexity and removing technical barriers, UCP enables businesses to actively participate in the new era of agentic commerce.

How It’s Used

UCP is designed for use by all stakeholders in the commerce ecosystem: businesses, AI platforms, developers, payment providers, and consumers. In practice, businesses and agents will choose services (for example, shopping) they need to support and expose capabilities corresponding to those needs, such as product discovery and checkout, as well as specialized functions such as discounts.

UCP’s payments architecture separates what consumers use to pay from payment handlers so it can scale to support a diverse set of payment providers. UCP also supports multiple transports including Google’s Agent2Agent protocol, MCP, and APIs to provide flexibility for businesses and agents to communicate.

Google emphasized that UCP is designed to be vendor-agnostic so it can support agentic commerce on any platform or device. The company has built a reference implementation for consumers to purchase directly within AI Mode in search and Gemini. The company noted it has more than 20 partners today and encourages participation in the project through its GitHub repository.

Concluding Thoughts

Google has arrayed a powerful set of backers to drive UCP forward and it shows signs of being another specification, like MCP. that the industry will embrace to accelerate AI adoption and, in this case, AI-driven commerce. Now it will bear close watching to see how quickly and aggressively other tech vendors that have enthusiastically embraced MCP will also embrace UCP to advance the standard and its utilization in the developer and user stakeholder categories.

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