Weāre heading like a runaway freight train towards Holiday 26, itās a good time to take a āstep upā and look at the āState of Agentic Commerceā and what it means for your Strategy for Holiday and ā27.
The protocol layer under personal shopping agents now distinguishes two authorisation states, and holiday planning turns on which one a merchant will accept. Google's Agent Payments Protocol, published under Apache 2.0, defines a Cart Mandate for human-present purchases, signed by the user over one tokenised payment method and a fixed amount. For human-not-present purchases it defines an Intent Mandate, signed over product categories, a list of chargeable payment methods, a natural-language playback of the prompt, and a time-to-live. A smaller retailer can accept the first with little change and still decline the second. The spec lets merchants force user confirmation, and does not settle who absorbs a disputed Intent Mandate.
Agreed that product descriptions are the cheap win. The image file is the part teams forget. Google Merchant Center now expects AI images to keep their IPTC DigitalSourceType tags, and Amazon wants contains-synthetic-performer in the XMP dc:subject field for fully synthetic people. Both are easy to strip on export.
Good read!
Yes, distribution is what matters in the end!
Having said that, I still have a few thoughts to add when it comes to true agentic capabilities that can produce real sustainable value at the application layer - https://ajlewis90.substack.com/p/genai-model-capabilities-and-benchmarks
The protocol layer under personal shopping agents now distinguishes two authorisation states, and holiday planning turns on which one a merchant will accept. Google's Agent Payments Protocol, published under Apache 2.0, defines a Cart Mandate for human-present purchases, signed by the user over one tokenised payment method and a fixed amount. For human-not-present purchases it defines an Intent Mandate, signed over product categories, a list of chargeable payment methods, a natural-language playback of the prompt, and a time-to-live. A smaller retailer can accept the first with little change and still decline the second. The spec lets merchants force user confirmation, and does not settle who absorbs a disputed Intent Mandate.
Agreed that product descriptions are the cheap win. The image file is the part teams forget. Google Merchant Center now expects AI images to keep their IPTC DigitalSourceType tags, and Amazon wants contains-synthetic-performer in the XMP dc:subject field for fully synthetic people. Both are easy to strip on export.