Ant International has partnered with Google to support the launch of Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard designed to scale AI-powered agentic commerce across the entire shopping journey.
This collaboration strengthens the global ecosystem for AI-driven payments, digital commerce, and financial technology, enabling frictionless interactions from product discovery to post-purchase support.
What Is Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is a new open standard that establishes a common language for intelligent agents, businesses, and payment providers. Instead of building separate integrations for each AI agent or platform, UCP allows all participants to interact through a unified framework.
Built to operate across industries, UCP is compatible with existing protocols such as Agent2Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and Model Context Protocol (MCP). This interoperability is essential for scaling agentic commerce, where AI systems autonomously assist users with shopping decisions and transactions.
According to Ashish Gupta, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, industry-wide alignment on standards like UCP is critical to unlocking the full potential of AI-led commerce.
How AI-Powered Commerce Is Evolving
With UCP as the backbone, AI-enabled shopping experiences—such as the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search—are rapidly evolving. Soon, users will be able to complete purchases directly within AI chat interfaces, eliminating the need to jump between apps or websites.
When a user expresses shopping intent, the AI understands preferences, curates relevant products, and enables checkout through a single tap using Google Pay (GPay). The result is a faster, simpler, and more intuitive shopping experience, redefining how consumers interact with digital commerce platforms.
Ant International’s Role in Scaling Agentic Commerce
Ant International is bringing its deep expertise in global payments, alternative payment methods (APMs), and AI-powered fintech solutions to support merchants in this new commerce paradigm.
According to Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International, the company aims to deliver merchant-friendly, trusted, and seamless agentic commerce solutions that drive long-term business growth.
Ant International’s strategy focuses on three core capabilities essential for AI-enabled commerce.
1. Control Over Algorithmic Engagement
As shopping shifts from human browsing to AI-mediated decisions, merchants must retain control over how their brand is represented. Ant International enables businesses to define how brand identity, offers, loyalty programs, and memberships are executed by AI agents—ensuring consistency, accuracy, and service excellence.
2. Seamless, Agent-Native Payments
Leveraging its leadership in alternative payment methods and digital wallets, Ant International has developed agent-native payment solutions powered by Antom EasySafePay. This allows users to remain fully within the AI experience throughout checkout, reducing friction and improving conversion rates.
3. Trust and Security Across the Journey
Trust is foundational in agentic commerce, where users delegate purchasing authority to AI systems. Ant International ensures verifiable user intent, traceable transactions, and clear accountability across the payment lifecycle.
EasySafePay uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC)-based AI risk management and mobile security systems to detect fraud, block unauthorized transactions, and offer money-back guarantees in cases of account takeover fraud.
A Global Vision for AI-Driven Commerce
Ant International currently supports merchants, fintechs, and banks across 200+ markets, connecting 1.8 billion user accounts and 150 million merchants, with a strong presence in Asia-Pacific and emerging markets.
To further advance secure and interoperable agentic commerce, Ant International continues to co-develop new protocols with industry partners, including ongoing work on Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and pilot programs for card-based AI agent transactions with global card networks.
About Ant International
With headquarters in Singapore and main operations across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, Ant International is a leading global digital payment, digitisation and financial technology provider. Through collaboration across the private and public sectors, our unified techfin platform supports financial institutions and merchants of all sizes to achieve inclusive growth through a comprehensive range of cutting-edge digital payment and financial services solutions. To learn more, please visit https://www.ant-intl.com/
