Google's new plan to build trust in AI agents as personal shoppers
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AI agent-driven e-commerce could get a boost from a new Google-backed software standard unveiled Tuesday that aims to make chatbot-enabled purchases smoother and more trustworthy.
Why it matters: Industry analysts expect consumers to rapidly embrace buying stuff with the help of AI — but only if they can count on a chatbot doing exactly what they tell it to do.
Driving the news: Google's new agent payments protocol, or AP2, extends existing standards — like the agent to agent (A2A) and model context (MCP) protocols — to e-commerce.
- Google is assuming both consumers and merchants will use "multiple agents built by multiple vendors," Rao Surapaneni, VP of Google Cloud's business applications platform, told Axios.
- All these agents will need to communicate in a reliable and trusted way.
Between the lines: The new payments protocol is designed to be able to "prove that a user gave an agent the specific authority to make a particular purchase," "be sure that an agent's request accurately reflects the user's true intent," and "determine accountability if fraudulent or incorrect transaction occurs," according to a new Google blog post.
- The goal is to "capture the intent of the buyer" in a reliable way in new kinds of transactions where the human user isn't present but is represented by an agent, Stavan Parikh, VP of payments at Google, told Axios.
Zoom out: The U.S. payments system that has evolved around e-commerce is complex and dependent on a wide variety of powerful players, including Visa, Apple Pay, Amazon, Stripe, Square (now Block), Zelle and other bank-backed systems.
Zoom in: Google says AP2 already has buy-in from more than 60 partners, including Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Coinbase, Etsy, Okta and Alibaba.
Our thought bubble: An open standard backed by Google could rapidly spread, or face multiple challenges and rivals.
- Single-standard systems offer convenience and interoperability, but ecosystems with multiple competing standards can be more resilient and adaptable.
What they're saying: Google's success at bringing partners and competitors like Amazon and Microsoft along with its agent-to-agent protocol shows it understands an "open and collaborative environment" is the best way to build a new ecosystem, Surapaneni says.
Flashback: In the early days of the web, users were reluctant to make purchases on new platforms until they could trust that the technology wouldn't run wild on them and that their credit card info and other personal data wouldn't be abused.
- Browser encryption standards like SSL helped make consumers comfortable with web purchases, and Google sees AP2 playing a similar role in agentic e-commerce.
