Google updated its Universal Commerce Protocol, the agentic commerce standard it launched in January, with three new capabilities including:
- A Cart option that lets AI agents add multiple items from the same store to a shopping cart, same as they would on the store itself. Initially UCP only supported single item checkout.
- A Catalog feature that allows agents to retrieve real-time product details like variants, inventory, and pricing.
- Identity Linking that gives shoppers the same loyalty benefits and member pricing through UCP-integrated platforms as they would get logging into a retailer’s site directly. This will enable merchants to treat shoppers like their own customers, as opposed to anonymous users.
Honestly it’s hard to believe that some of these features weren’t available during the original launch of UCP a couple months ago, especially the first two. Agentic commerce is often referred to as the future of e-commerce, but it currently feels like it’s simply recreating the past three decades one feature at a time. To be fair, it’s happening over the course of months instead of decades, so I should be patient.
Is Google already winning the agentic protocol war?
OpenAI recently scaled back its plans to introduce commerce directly inside ChatGPT and is now pivoting towards having checkouts take place inside ChatGPT apps. As a co-creator of Agentic Commerce Protocol with Stripe, a standard that competes with Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI’s pullback is ultimately a few points in UCP’s favor.
If you were an e-commerce platform or marketplace developing your future tech stack around an AI commerce protocol, would you lean towards developing it around standards built by Google, which has played a huge role in commerce search and discovery for decades, or standards co-developed by OpenAI, which can’t seem to decide if it wants to go all-in on commerce yet?
The recent moves by OpenAI, which was poised to be the biggest platform that utilized ACP, make me question whether Stripe should simply end the protocol altogether and exclusively support UCP, as it’s already been an endorser of UCP since it launched. Does agentic commerce really need a Betamax and a VHS format? Or could this be the one time that tech companies learn from the past and work towards one accepted format early on?
Personally, I feel the best move Google could make with UCP is to spin it off into its own nonprofit organization governed by an independent body with Shopify, Stripe, Walmart, Microsoft, and other tech leaders given a seat at the table in shaping its future. OpenAI and Amazon can even come too! That’s the only way I truly see UCP becoming a universal standard like TCP/IP, HTML, and CSS, as opposed to being forever known as a Google product. Then again, UCP might win out either way.
