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Google vs. OpenAI vs. Visa: competing agent protocols threaten the future of AI commerce

When Walmart and OpenAI announced that the retailer would integrate with ChatGPT, the question became how quickly OpenAI could deliver on the promise of agents buying things for people. In the battle of AI-enabled commerce, getting agents to securely complete transactions is one of the biggest hurdles. More and more, chat platforms like ChatGPT are replacing browsers and getting very good at surfacing information people search for. Users will ask ChatGPT for the best humidifiers on the market, and when the model returns results, people have no choice but to click the item link and complete the purchase online. AI agents, as of now, don’t have the ability or the trust infrastructure to make people and banking institutions feel safe enough to let it loose on someone’s cash. Enterprises and other industry players understand that, to allow agents to pay for purchases, there must be a common language shared among the model and agent providers, the bank, the merchant, and, to a lesser extent, the buyer.  And so, over the past few weeks, three competing agentic commerce standards have emerged: Google announced the Agent Pay Protocol (AP2) with partners including PayPal, American Express, Mastercard, Salesforce and ServiceNow. Soon after, OpenAI and Stripe debuted the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and just this week, Visa launched the Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP).All these protocols aim to give agents the trust layer they need to convince banks and their customers that they’re money is safe in the hands of an AI agent. But these may also create walled gardens, showing just how immature agentic commerce really is. This is a problem that could cause enterprises to bet on one chat platform and the agentic pay protocol it runs on, instead of interoperability. How are they differentIt’s not new for players to propose several standards. It usually takes years for the industry to coalesce around a single standard, or even to use different protocols and figure out a way to harmonize them. However, the pace of innovation in enterprise moved the needle on that.  Fairly quickly, MCP became the de facto channel for tool-use identification, and most companies began setting up MCP servers or connecting to one. (To be clear, it is not a standard yet) But having three different potential standards might slow that process down a bit, because it’s harder to coalesce on a single standard when there are so many to choose from. These protocols all aim to prove authorization. Both AP2 and TAP rely on cryptographic proofs to show an agent is acting on an individual's behalf. For TAP, agents are added to an approved list and get a digital key identifying them. AP2 uses a digital contract that serves as a proxy for human approval for the agent. OpenAI’s ACP doesn’t require too much of an infrastructure change, where ACP essentially acts as a courier to the merchant because the agent relays information to the merchant. Walled gardensThese three protocols ideally work across different chat platforms, but that is never guaranteed, especially when your biggest chat platform competitor has its own protocol. A danger with competing protocols is that they can create wall gardens, where they only work on specific platforms. Enterprises face the problem of getting stuck in a platform and an agentic payment standard that will not interoperate with another. Organizations receive not only the product recommended by the agent, but are also most often the merchants of record and need to trust that the agent contacting them is acting on behalf of a customer.Louis Amira, cofounder and CEO of agent commerce startup Circuit and Chisel, told VentureBeat that while this creates an opportunity for companies in the interoperability layer like his, it could create confusion for enterprises. “The better the protocol proposals get, the more likely they are to end up being walled gardens and very hard to interoperate,” Amira said. “We suspect that they’re going to be fighting it out for the next few years, and the more they fight it out, the more you actually need somebody that sits underneath all of them.”Unlike the internet, where anyone can use any browser to access a website, thanks in large part to the TCP/IP standard, chat platforms tend to remain very separate. 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 actually have to open Gemini to do so—the same works for anyone shopping via chatbot.  The number of protocol proposals underscores just how far we are from enabling shopping agents. The industry still needs to decide which standard to get behind, and no matter how many Walmarts integrate with ChatGPT, it’s all moot if people don’t trust the model or agent to handle their cash. Take the best features, hopefully
The best thing for enterprises to do for now is to experiment with all the protocols and hope that a winner emerges. Eventually, there could be one agentic commerce protocol that takes the best of each proposal. For Wayne Liu, chief growth officer and president for Americas at Perfect Corp., having multiple protocol proposals just means there’s more learning.“This is where the importance of open source exists because it will be the driving force to put everything together,” Liu said.  Of course, what would be interesting to see these next couple of weeks is if there will only be three competing agentic commerce protocols. After all, there are some large retailers and chat platforms that can still throw a wrench into the whole thing.