OpenAI has ACP, Google has AP2, Shopify has its own thing. Whats next?
The web was built for human eyes. Now the "customer" is increasingly an AI agent that can't read your layout, guesses at your forms, and renders a whole page just to find one price.
So everyone's shipping a protocol to fix it:
OpenAI + Stripe → ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) - the rails behind ChatGPT's Instant Checkout.
Google → AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) - mandate-based, 60+ partners (Mastercard, PayPal, Amex), now handed to the FIDO Alliance.
If you run a store, this should feel familiar. It's the "build a separate app for every assistant" trap. IE vs Netscape. A native app per platform. Do you now integrate ACP and AP2 and MCP and whatever Amazon ships next quarter - and re-do it every time a new agent shows up?
The real question isn't which protocol is best. It's whether agentic commerce fragments into walled gardens (buy in ChatGPT, buy in Gemini, each needing bespoke work), or whether we get an open layer where you describe your store once and every agent can use it.
Curious where people land:
Merchants/devs: would you wire up multiple agent protocols directly, or wait for a standard to settle?
Does one protocol win outright (like HTTP), or do we get a translation layer above all of them?
Who should own the standard - the AI labs, the payment networks, or a neutral body?
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