commerce agentique

Sundar Pichai launched the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF 2026 on 11 January, an Apache 2.0 standard co-developed with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy and Wayfair and backed by more than 60 organizations, with four transports (REST, Anthropic's MCP, Agent2Agent, embedded JSON-RPC). OpenAI and Stripe had already shipped the competing Agentic Commerce Protocol in September 2025, which levies a 4% commission per transaction. Amazon joined neither, building Rufus, Alexa+ and "Buy for Me" instead, and blocking OpenAI's crawlers by withdrawing 600 million products.

The measurements ran ahead of the standards. Shopify reported AI-driven traffic up 7x and AI-driven orders up 11x since January 2025; Adobe measured a 693% rise in generative-AI traffic; Salesforce attributed 20% of retail sales to AI agents. Riskified's survey found 73% of respondents already using AI somewhere in a purchase, though only 13% let it complete the transaction.

Two readings of consumer trust sit unreconciled across these sources. Riskified recorded 70% comfort with AI assistants completing transactions independently, and near-parity in decision influence between AI (36%) and human sellers (38%). The NRF material reports that only 24% of consumers trust AI to make purchases.

What breaks first is measurement. Max Thilén estimates 70-90% of purchase journeys are already invisible to traditional analytics, with agentic flows approaching 100%: the first observable signal becomes an order webhook. Jeff Otto, Riskified's marketing director, raises the unresolved question of who carries liability when a transaction passes through an AI intermediary, the merchant or the assistant.