New ground rules let AI agents approach every Shopify store on behalf of customers

The American AI company Sierra released version 1.0 of Poppy, short for Personal Agent Protocol, on Friday. A protocol is a set of fixed rules that computers follow so that they understand each other. Sierra is led by Bret Taylor, who was previously co-CEO of Salesforce together with Marc Benioff.

Poppy sets out how a personal AI agent, an AI program that carries out tasks for someone on its own, introduces itself to a company and finds out what it is allowed to do there on behalf of its user.

Two big players are taking part from the start. Shopify, the platform that runs online shops in more than 175 countries, has switched Poppy on for all of those shops. Every Shopify store now automatically puts a Poppy file online; shop owners do not have to do anything. And Muse, Meta's AI agent, first checks for such a file on every site it visits.

According to Sierra, more than a hundred companies are now involved in its development, including Delta Air Lines, Intuit, Salesforce, Cisco, Twilio and Zoom. Meta, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart were there from the beginning.

First introductions, then shopping

Poppy only handles the introduction: the agent says who it is and reads what it is allowed to do. The shopping itself, such as searching for products, filling a basket and paying, runs through a different set of rules that Shopify stores already use. Shopify helped write the link between the two. With it, an agent can shop as a guest or log in to the customer's account, and for certain steps it must first ask the customer for permission. Customers decide for themselves what their agent may and may not do, and can change that later.

A few companies are already showing how this works. At the American bank Mercury, an agent can view balances and prepare a payment or transfer; the bank first checks it against the approval rules that apply to the account. At Turkish Airlines, an agent can look up fares and flight status and find a booking using the booking reference and surname. Members of the loyalty programme can have their agent look for an upgrade to business class, which they approve themselves before paying.

Poppy is not quite finished yet. The guide for companies still calls version 1.0 a draft, so the rules may still change. Companies that want to take part can use the implementation kit.

What does this mean for the road to the singularity?

AI agents can already visit websites and arrange things for people, but every site works differently. As a result, an agent today often has to work out for itself where to click, and a shop does not know who is acting on behalf of whom. With fixed rules, the agent knows straight away what is possible and what is allowed, and the shop knows which customer it is acting for. That makes this kind of help more reliable.

The fact that Shopify and Muse are joining straight away puts pressure on others. A shop that does not support Poppy may soon miss out on customers who buy through an agent, and the maker of an agent that cannot read it will be able to do less at all those Shopify stores. In this way, one set of rules can quickly become the normal way of working. If that happens, a person could soon have a single agent rebook a flight, keep track of bills and buy a present, while still approving the big decisions themselves. The risk is that an agent does more than intended; that is why clear permissions and approval before every payment remain the most important part of the rules.

What is the technological singularity? Read the explanation →