My bot buys from your bot

I’ve talked for some time about bot-to-bot payments in the Agentic AI world. The idea is that you won’t have to think as money thinks for you, and payments will transfer automatically without intervention.

Moving this forward is a recent announcement from Google, which has developed the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework that enables agents to securely make purchases for users.

What is AP2?

AP2 is “an open protocol developed with leading payments and technology companies to securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms” developed with leading financial firms like Adyen, American Express, Ant International, Coinbase, Etsy, Forter, Intuit, JCB, Mastercard, Mysten Labs, Paypal, Revolut, Salesforce, ServiceNow, UnionPay International, Worldpay, and more.

It addresses the fundamentals of finance online from authorisation, authenticity and accountability through mandates, the fact that you delegate the agent the authority to transact on your behalf.

Mandates address the two primary ways a user will shop with an agent:

• Real-time purchases (human present): When you ask an agent, “Find me new white running shoes,” your request is captured in an initial Intent Mandate. This provides the auditable context for the entire interaction in a transaction process. After the agent presents a cart with the shoes you want, your approval signs a Cart Mandate. This is a critical step that creates a secure, unchangeable record of the exact items and price, ensuring what you see is what you pay for.
• Delegated tasks (human not present): When you delegate a task like, “Buy concert tickets the moment they go on sale,” you sign a detailed Intent Mandate upfront. This mandate specifies the rules of engagement—price limits, timing, and other conditions. It serves as verifiable, pre-authorized proof that can allow the agent to automatically generate a Cart Mandate on your behalf once your precise conditions are met.

Stavan Parikh, the VP/GM of Payments at Google, described it as a “common language” that helps agents smoothly work with merchants to transact and describes use cases such as booking a flight: “in the future, a user could simply instruct their AI agent to book a round-trip flight and a hotel for a specific weekend with a total budget of $1,500. The agent could then find a combination that fits and securely execute both bookings simultaneously.”

Interestingly, in a similar development, Mastercard is adding support for AP2 while also building out its own stack with Agent Pay, which registers agents and then governs them using Mastercard’s own tokenisation system.

“Agentic Tokens enable agentic payments via conversational interfaces and at millions of merchants, giving everyone in the value chain — consumers, issuers, and merchants — clear visibility into agent-facilitated transactions and delivering greater transparency,” says Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard.

“Payments are quickly becoming essential to how AI platforms interact with the world. For Mastercard and our partners, that means evolving from enabling digital transactions to enabling digital decision-making. Financial players will need to provide not only the infrastructure for money movement but also the frameworks, credentials, and APIs that make AI-powered transactions secure and interoperable. With our end-to-end solutions, we’re helping banks, developers, and merchants integrate payments safely into AI-driven experiences. The goal is not only to adapt to this technology but to shape it responsibly,” he added.

Add to this ChatGPT who have launched instant checkout and you can see a new future where bots deal with bots on your behalf and do everything, including payments. The future is here.

If you want to know more, read Shubham Sharma’s write up at Future Nexus.