Back in September, Google and PayPal announced their multilayer partnership to transform commerce with AI. And now building on their goal to transform commerce, PayPal and Google Cloud announced that they are bringing an agentic shopping experience to life with a new offering that combines Google Cloud’s Conversational Commerce agent with payments powered by PayPal.
Agentic commerce solution for merchants from PayPal and Google Cloud
The PayPal agent will communicate securely with the merchant’s agent over the open Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, as well as being integrated with the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a payments layer built on top of A2A and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that provides trust, accountability, and fraud controls.
With this new offering, merchants will have the option to adopt Google Cloud’s Conversational Commerce Agent or build their own agents using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK). The Conversational Commerce Agent is designed to engage shoppers in natural, human-like conversations, guiding them from initial intent and product discovery to a completed purchase.
Once deployed, the merchant’s commerce agent can understand complex requests, suggest relevant products, answer questions, and personally assist the user through their shopping journeys. The merchant’s commerce agent engages the PayPal agent through A2A to help improve product recommendations. Meanwhile, once a customer is ready to check out, the PayPal Agent, in line with AP2, will provide a seamless and secure checkout experience within the conversational interface.
AP2 provides a common, secure language for AI agents to transact on behalf of users, extending the core constructs of the A2A Protocol and MCP to establish the essential foundation for secure, accountable, and authorized commerce. AP2 uses mandates- tamper-proof, cryptographically signed digital contracts that provide verifiable proof of user intent, like a cart mandate, a payment mandate. These mandates are signed by Verifiable Digital Credentials, creating a non-repudiable audit trail.
