On October 6, 2026, Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, co-founders of Sierra, announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard that Meta and Sierra are developing with Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. It aims to define how consumers' personal agents interact with businesses: authentication, power given to the consumer, and visibility for the business into what these agents do, whether through its website, its APIs, or its own agents.
The post starts from an observation: most personal agents today use websites and applications the way a person would, loading pages and filling out forms, and sometimes fall back on the support line or chat. This takes time and the task can fail, whereas a direct connection would accomplish it in a few seconds. To be adopted, it must serve three parties: consumers want speed, reliability and trust, brands want to know when an agent is acting for a customer and decide what it can do, and agent developers want direct, uniform access to participating businesses.
The principle adopted is that the consumer decides the access granted to their agent and the business sets the parameters of what the agent can do. The protocol begins on the website, where the agent discovers the offering and the ways to reach the business, then opens a session on behalf of its user. It can start as a guest, which is enough to check availability or a return policy. If the task requires account access, the customer logs in on the business's page or uses credentials already configured with their agent, and chooses between read-only and write access. The session relies on OAuth and continues across channels. The agent can then act through the website, through APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or through the business's agent for conversational tasks such as a warranty claim. The business chooses what it exposes.
Going forward, the authors plan to publish version 0.1 of the specification before the end of the month, to hold design workshops, and to provide a reference implementation. They mention more granular per-action permissions, push notifications (a delayed flight, an order shipped), and payment extensions allowing purchases without sharing a card number.
Executives from Genesys, Rocket, Shopify and Stripe comment on the announcement. Genesys speaks of a "new front door for the enterprise" where brands need to know who the agent represents, its authorizations and its intent. Rocket describes a Muse agent developed with Sierra that moves across its platform, from searching for a home to financing it. Shopify sees it as a new frontier of customer service, and Stripe a way to recognize customers' agents and interact with them efficiently.