My day was off to a bad start. Just when I was looking forward to my first coffee, that darn Nespresso explodes into light and heat! A few months ago, I would have logged on to Amazon or Best Buy, studied the customer reviews, and spent my weekend comparing offers. Suffice it to say, I was in for a few evenings of hesitation before getting my new machine!
But it’s October 2025, and I decided to test the synthesis capabilities of my favorite LLM to perform this onerous research/comparison task. After correctly prompting my query with my precise specifications, my trusted AI assistant sprang into action.
Within seconds, it had scanned the available options, compared features, analyzed customer reviews and prices, and offered me a list of the best options.
Perfect! I now had all the information I needed.
And then comes a game-changing feature: ChatGPT offers to finalize the purchase for me. Thanks to the AP2 protocol, it can directly access your various bank accounts (MCP/Open Banking) and, after checking that you have sufficient funds in your Chime neobank account, it carries out the transaction for you.
You don’t even need to enter your bank details. It’s fast, smooth and secure.
This little story perfectly illustrates the importance of AP2, the Agent Payments Protocol launched by Google on September 16, a protocol that could transform the way we make payments in a world increasingly dominated by intelligent agents.
Why is the AP2 protocol essential?
In the near future, artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. AI agents, like ChatGPT, will interact with us in increasingly autonomous ways, handling tasks ranging from managing our schedules to purchasing goods and services.
But these agents will need to be able to manage financial transactions securely and transparently. This is where AP2 comes in.
AP2 is an open protocol that enables AI agents to make secure and transparent payments on behalf of users, with their explicit consent.
AP2 meets three major challenges when it comes to managing payments made by AI agents:
- Authorization: How can we be sure that the user has given his consent for each transaction? In our example, ChatGPT would have first confirmed your desire to buy the coffee maker before proceeding with the transaction.
- Authenticity: How can we ensure that the program’s request accurately reflects your intentions and choices? Thanks to AP2, AI can interact transparently and make sure that you are the one initiating the purchase.
- Accountability: In the event of error or fraud, it must be easy to determine who is responsible. AP2 introduces traceability mechanisms and securely signed digital mandates, ensuring true accountability for every transaction.
A secure, interoperable payment ecosystem
AP2 isn’t just a proprietary solution: it’s an open, interoperable protocol. This means it can work with a wide variety of payment systems, from traditional bank cards to digital wallets and even cryptocurrencies.
In our story, we used your Chime balance, but in the future, multiple payment methods could be supported without requiring complex configuration, even splitting the payment over several sources (50% btc, 50% USD).
A natural extension of open banking
This system is also a direct extension of the open banking concept, where financial institutions open up their APIs to enable more fluid interaction between different services.
Using AP2 and MCP(see previous article), AI agents can securely access financial information (such as your Chime account balance) and make payments or transactions on behalf of the user, always with their explicit consent.
This enables intelligent assistants to make online purchases seamlessly and instantly, while maintaining a level of security and transparency comparable to that of traditional payments.
The ecosystem becomes more intelligent, more responsive, and above all, more autonomous.
Trust and adoption: the keys to success
Trust is essential in the adoption of new technologies, and AP2 understands this. The protocol provides strong authentication, using tools such as biometrics and device keys to guarantee that the user is who they claim to be.
What’s more, open standards (HTTPS and mutual TLS) enhance transaction security, which is crucial in the world of digital payments.
For this model to work, it is also important that users, merchants, and financial institutions have confidence in the AI agents carrying out these transactions. AP2 ensures this by introducing a series of accountability and transparency rules.
The agentic web: a vision for the future
The launch of AP2 is part of a broader vision of the agentic web. Imagine a web where intelligent agents collaborate with each other to carry out transactions, manage personal information, and interact with digital services in a totally autonomous way.
See also:
What you need to understand about agentic AI protocols to adapt your strategy
This world, which still seems a long way off, could become a reality with protocols like AP2, which enable these agents to operate safely and efficiently.
Set up intelligent orchestration with Axway Amplify
In this future of agentic commerce, where AI assistants interact with protocols like AP2 to carry out transactions, being able to orchestrate flows between agents, backend systems, and financial services will become crucial.
This is where Axway can play a strategic role:
- Amplify Fusion connects and orchestrates flows between AI agents and information systems, ensuring fine-grained governance of the APIs exposed to agents. For example, it could manage API calls to banks, e-commerce retailers, or logistics services, while respecting security and consent rules.
- Amplify AI Gateway adds a layer of control and traceability tailored to interactions between AI agents and APIs, by integrating mechanisms for verifying, filtering, and monitoring agent intent. This is a direct response to the authenticity and accountability issues raised by the AP2 protocol.
The Amplify Platform as a whole offers API federation, enabling companies to govern their digital assets, while opening up secure access to AI agents in an extended open banking logic.
A new era for commerce and payments
The launch of AP2 is not just a step forward for online commerce. It represents a fundamental disruption in the way we conceive of and use digital financial transactions.
As in our coffee maker example, where ChatGPT not only helps you choose the right product, but also manages the transaction for you, AI agents are set to become key players in managing our daily lives.
Whether for making purchases, managing subscriptions, or even making payments for on-demand services, AP2 offers a flexible, secure, and scalable solution for a fully agentic future of commerce.
To learn more and contribute to the evolution of this protocol, visit the AP2 GitHub repository.
Of course, all of this will work much better with cryptocurrencies (Btc, Eth) which, in addition to the transaction, would enable notarization of the transactions, thus acting as a trusted digital third party (virtually free of charge) in the event of a claim, or carrying out payment only once delivery of the good has been validated.
For this vision of agentic commerce to become a reality on a large scale, we need solutions capable of orchestrating these complex interactions between agents, backend systems, and financial services.
Rethinking integration in an AI-driven world