At the National Retail Federation's annual conference, Sundar Pichai announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a shared specification for how AI agents discover merchants and transact with them. It was built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by more than twenty others including Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa. The point was to remove the need for a bespoke connection to every individual agent. Google presented it as compatible with, rather than a replacement for, Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol and the Model Context Protocol. A buy path using it was to appear in AI Mode in Search and in the Gemini app for participating US retailers. What was new at the time was gathering the major retail and payment players behind a single specification for agents that complete a purchase on your behalf.