Google's Anurag Sinha presented the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at Open Source Summit North America 2026, an open standard designed to create a shared language for AI-driven agentic commerce. As AI agents increasingly handle shopping decisions and purchases, UCP addresses fragmentation across merchants, payment providers, and platforms by providing a layered architecture with Services, Capabilities, Extensions, and a transport-agnostic layer supporting REST, Model Context Protocol, and Agent2Agent. The protocol is open source, allowing merchants and developers to contribute, and has grown through new capabilities, an expanded Tech Council, and consumer experiences built on top of it. Industry forecasts suggest agentic shopping could represent 10–25% of U.S. e-commerce by 2030.
