This is the second article in our series on agentic AI for in-house counsel.
Agentic AI—artificial intelligence systems capable of
autonomously planning and performing tasks, making decisions, and
interacting with various systems to accomplish specific,
pre-defined goals—is gaining recognition as the next
evolution of artificial intelligence. Agentic commerce applies this
capability to shopping and purchasing, empowering AI agents to
coordinate and often fully execute transactions with online
retailers: consider, for example, an AI assistant that monitors the
price of flights and automatically books tickets once they drop
below a certain amount.
To enable agentic AI at scale, companies are developing and
adopting open-source protocols that establish a common language
between consumer tools, business platforms and payment providers.
For instance, in January 2026, Google released its Universal
Commerce Protocol (UCP), which was developed in collaboration
