The Registry tracks, explains, and benchmarks the standards landscape. The Consortium brings together the people and organizations building the next layer of commerce: merchants, platforms, payment providers, AI agent builders, infrastructure companies, protocol maintainers, researchers, standards bodies, and regulators.
Consortium interest is now open. Formal participation categories and governance are still being developed, and early involvement will begin through updates, contributor briefings, and working group discussions.
Why this matters now
AI agents are beginning to search, compare, authorize, and transact on behalf of people and businesses. That shift creates practical questions for every part of the commerce stack.
- How should agents discover trustworthy merchants, products, prices, inventory, and policies?
- How should users delegate consent, spending authority, identity, and payment permissions?
- How should merchants preserve control, compliance, attribution, fraud protections, and customer relationships?
- How should the industry evaluate whether a merchant, marketplace, platform, or protocol is truly agent-ready?
The Consortium exists to help organize those questions into shared language, working groups, implementation guidance, and readiness benchmarks.
Early areas of focus
The first areas of interest reflect where real agentic commerce deployments are starting to emerge.
- Payments & Authorization — delegated spending, agent-safe payment flows, credential isolation, refunds, fraud controls, and transaction auditability.
- Merchant Interfaces & Checkout — agent-readable product data, availability, pricing, policies, carts, checkout, fulfillment, and post-purchase actions.
- Identity, Consent & Delegation — user permissions, revocation, session boundaries, Know Your Customer, Know Your Agent, and verifiable delegated actions.
- Trust, Safety & Compliance — privacy, consumer protection, liability, disputes, compliance, and safeguards for real transaction volume.
- Developer Standards & Reference Implementations — open schemas, MCP tools, SDKs, testing harnesses, sample integrations, and practical implementation notes.
- Governance, Certification & ACRI™ — readiness criteria, benchmark methodology, certification paths, publication rules, and neutral evaluation standards.
Sponsorship interest
Organizations that want to help fund early research, contributor briefings, working group operations, readiness benchmarking, and public education can register sponsorship interest as the Consortium structure develops.
Initial sponsor paths are being designed for startup supporters, silver sponsors, gold sponsors, founding sponsors, and associate partners such as universities, nonprofits, standards bodies, and public-sector organizations.
Sponsorship will not imply protocol ownership, product endorsement, voting rights, or formal governance authority unless those rights are defined in written agreements and published Consortium policies.
How to express interest
For now, the best way to stay close to the work is to sign up for updates from Agentic Commerce. We will use that list to share contributor briefings, early working group announcements, protocol research, readiness updates, sponsor briefings, and opportunities to present relevant implementations.
If your organization is already building agentic commerce infrastructure, payments, merchant tooling, identity, authorization, developer tools, or live agent-mediated transaction flows, include a short note with links to technical materials, GitHub repositories, demos, or protocol documentation when you contact us.