Webinar: ACP, UCP, and the New Agentic Commerce Landscape

Agentic commerce is AI moving from advising to acting inside a commercial flow. Today, the most “agentic” part is usually discovery and consideration—the agent helps you search, compare, and narrow options. The transaction phase is still often human-controlled: the agent builds the cart, but a person typically hits “buy.”

Many vertical agents want to keep the entire purchase experience inside their app, not bouncing users out to a traditional merchant site. The most active category right now is fashion, because it has high research needs, higher average order values, and lots of personalization (like storing preferences or even a “closet”). Many are also combining chat + visual interfaces as a key differentiator.

ACP is typically described as three parts: product discovery, checkout, and delegated payments. The key security idea is delegated payments: instead of exposing card data inside an AI experience, the payment credential is handled by the PSP, which creates a short-lived, encrypted token/blob with conditions (like merchant + amount limits). That token is used to complete checkout without the AI handling raw PCI data.

The building blocks are similar—discovery → checkout → secure payment tokenization, but Google leans on Merchant Center as a structured product layer and uses a deterministic checkout UI (to reduce hallucination risk). In early UCP flows, Google Pay is used to generate an encrypted payment payload, which merchants (or their PSP) can decrypt and process in secure environments. UCP also includes more explicit post-purchase updates (like shipping/cancellation status).

Ask how far your providers are in supporting the emerging specs—and whether they can keep up with how fast things are changing. Even if protocols are designed to be “stack-agnostic,” there’s still real work: APIs to connect, specs to implement, and ongoing updates as requirements evolve. A practical litmus test is simple: if a vendor can’t speak fluently about ACP/UCP and what they’ve shipped, that’s a yellow flag.

In both ACP and UCP, the merchant remains the merchant of record and the transaction ultimately lands in the merchant’s existing commerce and order systems. The AI experience is largely orchestration, the merchant still receives the order details needed to fulfill it (and in some cases, merchants may receive more direct customer info than they would through a traditional marketplace model).