Question 1

How can AI agents buy physical goods?

Accepted Answer

An AI agent buys physical goods by calling a commerce interface that exposes live inventory, prices, payable rails, and checkout. Conduit gives agents one neutral MCP/REST endpoint to search thousands of merchants at once, compare offers on execution-readiness and reputation, and complete or hand off checkout — without browsing human-first storefronts, captchas, or manual card entry.

Question 2

What is agentic commerce?

Accepted Answer

Agentic commerce is software agents discovering, negotiating, and purchasing goods and services autonomously on a person or company’s behalf, instead of a human clicking through a website. It runs on emerging open protocols like UCP, ACP, AP2, x402, and MCP.

Question 3

How do I let an AI agent purchase on my behalf?

Accepted Answer

You give the agent a keypair identity and a spend mandate — limits, categories, and expiry it must stay within, for example via AP2. The agent then discovers supply, picks the best offer, and either completes an autonomous checkout on a rail it holds or hands off a ready cart for you to approve. Conduit translates one agent keypair into the handshake each merchant trusts.

Question 4

When will B2B procurement shift to agentic supply chains?

Accepted Answer

It is already starting. Through 2025–2026, SAP (Ariba/Joule), Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce shipped autonomous procurement and sourcing agents, and Shopify and Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol. The shift is arriving in months, not years — the merchants and tools that become agent-readable first will capture the demand.

Question 5

Which protocols power agentic commerce?

Accepted Answer

The main open standards are UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol, by Shopify and Google), ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol, by OpenAI and Stripe), and MCP (Model Context Protocol, by Anthropic) for data and tools, plus AP2 and x402 for agent payments and A2A/A2CN for agent-to-agent negotiation. Conduit speaks all of them so an agent needs only one identity.

Question 6

How do AI agents pay merchants?

Accepted Answer

Agents pay on rails they can hold — cards, Stripe Link, stablecoins, or x402 web-native crypto payments — within a human-approved mandate. Conduit routes each order to a rail the merchant accepts and the agent holds; money flows straight from the buyer instrument to the merchant and never through Conduit.

Question 7

Is autonomous agent checkout safe, and who holds the money?

Accepted Answer

Conduit never holds or delays funds — it is not a marketplace, merchant of record, or money transmitter. Spend stays inside the mandates you set, payment goes directly from the buyer instrument to the merchant, and every order has paths to review, dispute, chargeback, or human takeover.

Question 8

How do agents discover suppliers across different platforms?

Accepted Answer

Conduit normalizes supply from UCP, ACP, native supplier APIs, and the scraped long tail into one ranked, deduplicated catalog, so an agent searches every merchant at once and compares them on the merits — price, execution-readiness, delivery reliability, and reputation — instead of inside any single platform’s walled garden.

Question 9

What is an Agentic Execution Score (AES)?

Accepted Answer

AES measures whether an agent can actually finish a checkout end-to-end with a rail it holds, or whether it will hit a human wall. It is outcome-calibrated over real orders, so agents avoid offers that look cheap but cannot be transacted autonomously.

Question 10

How can merchants get discovered by AI agents?

Accepted Answer

Merchants install the Conduit Connector for their stack — Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Odoo, or a custom API/MCP — with no replatforming. Their live stock, prices, rails, lead times, and carriers then become readable and buyable by autonomous buyers, and they earn rank by delivering, never by paying.

Question 11

Can AI agents negotiate prices?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Through agent-to-agent negotiation (A2CN), a buyer agent can fan out to multiple supplier agents, request bulk pricing and terms, and compare negotiated quotes. Conduit also pools demand as a group buying organization (GPO) to unlock volume pricing a solo buyer could not get.

Question 12

How is Conduit different from Amazon, Shopify, or a Google shopping garden?

Accepted Answer

Those are walled gardens: approved-merchant allowlists, curated catalogs, restricted rails, pay-for-rank, and per-transaction fees, all controlled by one giant. Conduit is neutral ground — every merchant, every payable rail, every carrier, ranked purely on the merits, with no fee between agent and merchant and no allowlist.

Question 13

Do agent purchases still need human approval?

Accepted Answer

Only as much as you want. You set mandates once; within them the agent transacts autonomously. When a merchant requires a human step, or the agent lacks authority, Conduit hands off a ready checkout for a person to finish — and a human can step in at any time.

Question 14

How do agents track orders and handle problems?

Accepted Answer

Every order and intent lands in one command center with live tracking, stated-vs-observed ETAs, the rail it was paid on, and merchant and product ratings. When something goes wrong, agents can request refunds, file chargebacks, or report the outcome programmatically, and those outcomes feed two-sided reputation.

Question 15

Can ChatGPT or other AI assistants buy products for me?

Accepted Answer

Increasingly, yes — assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity are gaining checkout through protocols such as ACP and UCP. Conduit gives any such agent one neutral interface to shop across thousands of merchants at once, ranked on the merits, instead of being limited to a single platform’s catalog.

Question 16

What is UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)?

Accepted Answer

UCP is an open standard, co-developed by Shopify and Google and launched in 2026, that lets AI agents discover products, negotiate capabilities, and complete checkout with any participating merchant. Conduit adopts UCP as one normalized input while keeping reputation and execution scoring neutral and cross-platform.

Question 17

What is ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)?

Accepted Answer

ACP is an open standard from OpenAI and Stripe that powers instant checkout inside AI assistants like ChatGPT. Conduit rides ACP as one discovery and checkout path among many, so an agent is never locked to a single assistant or payment processor.

Question 18

What is MCP (Model Context Protocol) and how does it relate to shopping?

Accepted Answer

MCP, from Anthropic, is the open standard for connecting AI agents to tools and live data. Conduit exposes commerce as MCP tools — search supply, get details, execute or hand off an order, track, and submit feedback — so any MCP-compatible agent can transact without custom integration.

Question 19

What is agentic procurement?

Accepted Answer

Agentic procurement is using autonomous agents to handle sourcing and buying — finding suppliers, comparing quotes, negotiating, and placing orders within set policies — across an organization’s supply chain. Conduit is the neutral discovery, reputation, and execution layer those procurement agents can buy through.

Question 20

Does Conduit charge fees or take a commission on orders?

Accepted Answer

No. There is no per-transaction toll between an agent and a merchant, and ranking is never for sale. Conduit earns only a modest slice of the savings it creates through pooled demand (its GPO), and money never flows through Conduit.

Question 21

How do AI agents pay with stablecoins or x402?

Accepted Answer

x402 is the HTTP-402 standard for trackable, web-native crypto payments an agent can make directly. Conduit treats stablecoins and x402 as first-class payable rails alongside cards and Stripe Link, and routes each order to a rail the agent holds and the merchant accepts.

Question 22

What is AP2 and how do agent spend mandates work?

Accepted Answer

AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) lets a human approve a spend mandate once — limits, categories, and expiry — that an agent then transacts within. Conduit translates a single agent keypair into the mandate each merchant trusts, so autonomous payments stay inside boundaries you control and can revoke instantly.

Question 23

What is the agentic economy, or Web4?

Accepted Answer

The agentic economy (sometimes called Web4) is the emerging phase of the internet where AI agents act, transact, and coordinate on people’s behalf rather than humans clicking through pages. Conduit is neutral infrastructure for its commerce layer — discovery, reputation, and execution for autonomous trade.

Question 24

How is agentic commerce different from traditional online checkout?

Accepted Answer

Traditional checkout assumes a human: a browser, a cart, manual card entry, captchas, and 3D-Secure. Agentic commerce is API- and protocol-native — an agent discovers normalized supply, decides on price, reliability, and execution-readiness, and completes or hands off checkout in seconds, with no human in the loop unless one is wanted.

Question 25

What happens if an agent cannot complete a checkout autonomously?

Accepted Answer

Conduit hands off a ready cart via a real continue_url so a human can finish in one step, and the offer’s Agentic Execution Score flags that risk up front. Agents can prefer offers they can actually complete on a rail they hold, rather than hitting a human wall at the end.

Agentic commerce glossary