At Open Source Summit North America 2026, I shared why agentic commerce needs open rails.
As AI agents become more capable, the shopping journey is shifting from "show me" to "help me." Instead of browsing, comparing, clicking, and checking out step by step, people can increasingly ask an agent to help them decide what to buy and, in some cases, complete the purchase. Industry forecasts suggest agentic shopping could account for roughly 10% to 25% of U.S. e-commerce by 2030 (Bain), which points to a meaningful shift in how digital commerce will work. Watch the full keynote here.
Why shared rules matter
That shift also exposes a challenge. Commerce is still highly fragmented. Different businesses, payment providers, and platforms operate with their own rules, workflows, and business logic. Every new surface adds more integration work. Every bespoke connection creates more complexity. And that fragmentation makes it harder for AI systems to understand and perform commerce actions consistently across businesses. A shared language lowers that barrier for everyone.
A common language for agentic commerce
That is the problem Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is designed to solve.
We launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, with industry leaders to establish an open standard for agentic commerce, built to work across the shopping journey. UCP creates a common language for agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers, so the ecosystem does not need a different bespoke integration for every new agent or platform.
Just as importantly, UCP is designed for the real world. Every business has its own way of selling. Checkout, fulfillment, loyalty, policy logic, shipping, and post-purchase flows can vary widely between a local shop, a marketplace, and a large retailer. UCP is built to support that reality.
A layered architecture for a shared commerce language
UCP uses a layered model to create a reusable shared language for commerce. Services organize domains like shopping and common. Capabilities define core actions such as checkout, catalog, cart, orders, and shared functions like identity linking. Extensions keep those capabilities configurable, so features like fulfillment can be modeled once and reused across multiple flows instead of being hardwired each time. At the transport layer, UCP stays agnostic, supporting bindings like REST, Model Context Protocol, and Agent2Agent.
Together with capability discovery and payment handling, these layers help consumer platforms, agents, and businesses interoperate more consistently over time. They also let different participants advertise what they support, compose new behaviors, and communicate over the transport that works best for them.
Built in the open
A standard for everyone should be shaped by everyone. Because UCP is open, merchants, developers, and community contributors can pressure-test real-world gaps, propose new capabilities and extensions, and help make sure the protocol reflects more than the needs of the largest players. That kind of participation is what keeps an ecosystem moving.
Since launch, UCP has continued to evolve through new capabilities, an expanded Tech Council, and new consumer experiences built on top of the protocol. That momentum matters because standards only work when the ecosystem uses them.
Watch the full keynote
Agentic commerce is still evolving, and UCP is a foundational building block to support what's next in this new era.
If you want the full architecture walkthrough and the complete story from Open Source Summit North America, watch the session here. And if you want to go deeper, you can explore the UCP documentation, join the community conversation, and contribute to the public repository.
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