An open protocol for letting an AI agent complete a payment on someone’s behalf, with cryptographic proof of what the human actually authorised.
Also known as AP2, agentic payment rails, agent checkout protocol
AP2 is the transaction layer of the agent protocol stack. Where A2A defines how agents talk to each other and AdCP defines how media gets bought, AP2 defines how an agent pays: how it presents a mandate, how the merchant verifies that a human authorised it, and how the resulting dispute is adjudicated when something goes wrong.
The core idea is the mandate. Rather than handing an agent a card number, the user signs a scoped instruction (buy this specific item, or spend up to this amount in this category) that travels with the transaction as verifiable evidence. The merchant is not trusting the agent. It is checking a signature that traces back to a person.
This exists because the alternative is unworkable. Card networks are built around a human present at the point of sale, and an autonomous agent breaks the assumptions underneath chargeback rules, fraud scoring and liability. AP2 is the industry trying to define who is responsible before the volume arrives rather than after.
Most agency people will never implement AP2, but it decides whether the agentic commerce work they are pitching can actually close a sale.
It completes the stack you are already selling against. Pitches about agentic commerce tend to stop at discovery: get found by the agent. AP2 is the part where the agent can complete the purchase without a human going back to a browser. Without it, every agentic journey ends in a handoff, and the business case collapses.
Mandates are a new place where brand rules live. A mandate can be scoped by category, by price ceiling, by merchant. That is effectively a set of purchase rules sitting between the customer and the brand, and nobody in the agency currently thinks about how their client’s products qualify or fail to qualify inside one.
Liability language will reach the creative brief. Once payments are agent-initiated, legal and compliance start reviewing how offers, subscriptions and renewals are described, because an ambiguous offer is now an ambiguous machine-readable instruction. Expect approval cycles on promotional copy to get slower before they get faster.
An agency builds an agentic commerce pilot for a household supplies brand: a replenishment agent that watches usage and reorders. The prototype demos beautifully right up to checkout, where it stops and emails the customer a link, because the client’s payment provider has no way to accept an agent-initiated transaction. The pilot stalls for a quarter while procurement and the payment provider work out mandate support. The lesson the agency takes into its next three pitches is a slide nobody expected to need: a one-page readiness check covering feed quality, agent discoverability, and whether the client’s payments stack can accept a signed mandate at all.
The automations and agents module of the workshop teaches you how to build AI workflows that compress the busywork without taking the craft out of the studio.