Google is the latest to support the agentic commerce sector with its latest offering, as Ant International lends its payment expertise to make payments available in a single chatbot.
Ant International has been selected as Google’s chosen payment partner as the tech giant launched its agentic commerce service and today (January 12).
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an agentic commerce tool which supports customers with AI agents to help them navigate through the shopping journey, from the discovery phase through the point-of-sale.
UCP has deployed three key verticals; Agent2Agent, Agents Payments Protocol and Model Context Protocol, to perform alongside existing industry commerce standards.
Google has also developed a common language for AI agents to assist customers across merchants’ interfaces, as well as partnering with payment providers like Ant International to support the transaction process.
Users will also be able to make purchases using UCP with Pay with Gpay. This allows them to review their order and finalise the payment without leaving AI chatbot apps like Google’s Gemini in a bid to make the point-of-sale faster and more frictionless.
“For agentic commerce to scale, it’s critical for the industry to align on a common set of standards,” said Ashish Gupta, VP and GM of Merchant Shopping at Google.
“We are proud to have Ant International endorse the Universal Commerce Protocol as the foundation for that future.”
Ant International’s role in Google’s project
In September 2025, under its subsidiary Antom, Ant International launched an agentic AI payments solution for card-based and alternative payments backed by Visa and Mastercard.
The service uses AI agents to connect with various alternative payment methods, such as Ant International’s range of digital wallet partners, to embed payments within AI chatbots like Google’s Gemini to enable a payment prompt and process the final transaction.
Ant International will support the rollout of UCP to provide merchants with three core offerings. The first being control over algorithmic engagement, allowing merchants to remain in control of how their brand and offerings are represented and discovered by AI agents.
The second offering focuses on delivering an agent-native payment experience, which sees Ant International leverage its digital wallet partners to be integrated within AI chatbots to advance the payment process while not leaving the conversation.
Ant International has also emphasised trust within its core offerings. The payment company aims to ensure user intent is verifiable, transactional and traceable, with AI agents being transparent and accountable for the entire agentic commerce experience.
“Ant International is thrilled to deepen our collaboration with Google and support the Agentic Commerce ecosystem,” says Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International.
“By leveraging our leading payment capabilities, Ant International is creating unique agentic commerce solutions for merchants by delivering merchant friendly, seamless user experience and end-to-end trust, ultimately driving business growth.”
Ant International further explained that in order to build an interoperable and secure agentic commerce service with Google’s UCP, it intends to co-develop new agentic protocols with industry leaders to establish new standards in a payment innovation that has rapidly grown over the past year.
