So picture this: you tell your AI, “Plan me a weekend trip under $1,000,” and instead of dumping you 50 flight options and 20 hotel tabs, it just… books it. Flight, hotel, even that boutique bike rental if you’re feeling outdoorsy. Smooth. Well, Google thinks that future isn’t sci-fi anymore — and they’ve just launched a new standard to make it real.
It’s called the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and over 60 merchants and financial giants (think Mastercard, AmEx, PayPal) are already on board. The goal? A universal way for AI agents — those behind-the-scenes bots that shop, compare, and negotiate on your behalf — to buy stuff securely across platforms, while leaving behind a digital paper trail to keep things clean.
Here’s how it works: before an AI can splurge on your behalf, it needs two green lights from you. First, the “intent mandate”, basically, “Hey, AI, go find me a polka dot tie.” Then comes the “cart mandate,” which is your final thumbs up before checkout. For power users, there’s even a fully automated option, where your AI gets to complete the purchase by itself — as long as you set ground rules like budget caps and timing.
Of course, Google knows crypto people won’t want to be left out. That’s why they teamed up with Coinbase, Metamask, and the Ethereum Foundation to make sure AI agents can shop directly from crypto wallets too.
Google is pushing hard for openness here — the full AP2 spec is already on GitHub, and they’ve invited the wider payments and AI community to help shape the protocol. It’s a smart move, especially since competitors like Perplexity and Stripe are already dabbling in agentic payments.
The big takeaway? Agent-to-agent commerce is coming, and AP2 might just be the rails it runs on. Imagine a world where “add to cart” is replaced with “my AI already handled it.” Convenient? Yep. A little scary? Also yep. But either way, it looks like the shopping carts of the future won’t have wheels — they’ll have algorithms.
About the Author
