AI shops, so you don’t drop

Another week, another AI agent trying to make it easier to shop. OpenAI joins the agent commerce party with its new “instant checkout” feature in ChatGPT so users can buy directly from Etsy sellers in the chat. People can currently buy single items, and OpenAI says it will soon be possible to buy multiple items from over a million Shopify merchants, including Spanx and Glossier.

OpenAI’s news comes on the heels of Google’s recently launched Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a new framework that lets AI agents make payments securely on a shopper’s behalf and is backed by over 60 tech and payments partners such as Salesforce, Dell, Mastercard and PayPal. Not to be outdone, OpenAI launched its own protocol -- Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) alongside the option to buy in ChatGPT. ACP is currently powered by Stripe payments ACP is currently powered by Stripe payments, but the protocol is open source, so a merchant could technically use any payment processor.

So what is going on in this agentic commerce land-grab? IBM’s Principal Research Scientist, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, said in some ways OpenAI is trying to leapfrog past Google and get the “first mover advantage” with agentic AI commerce.

“OpenAI is trying to own the user experience, control the transaction and become the front door to commerce, which is, of course, a threat to Amazon,” said Kaoutar El Magrahoui in a recent Mixture of Experts episode. “Meanwhile, Google is setting standards and trying to be the protocol player here.”

In these early days of agent commerce, it’s unclear, for example, who is responsible if ChatGPT goes rogue. “It will be interesting to see how the credit card companies work out refuted transactions made by ChatGPT,” said Kate Soule, Director of Technical Project Management at IBM in Mixture of Experts. “Does that count as a fraudulent transaction?”

Accountability for fraudulent purchases is one of the core pillars that Google’s AP2 protocol is tackling. AP2 can be added as an extension to Google’s Agent2Agent protocol (A2A), a framework Google introduced this summer to allow agents and tools from any vendor to communicate with one another. At the end of the summer, IBM merged its own Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) under the  Linux Foundation. By merging the two protocols, “we can build a single, more powerful standard for how AI agents communicate and collaborate,” said Kate Blair, Director of Incubation for IBM Research, in a release. 

Now that money is starting to move between agents, it’s high time for regulation to catch up, said IBM Fellow Kush Varshnay in Mixture of Experts. “I think government needs to step in very quickly to help regulate the critical [payments] infrastructure being built not just for individual countries but for the entire global finance system.”