Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe today joined the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Tech Council, the body that steers the open standard defining how AI agents interact with businesses across the full shopping journey. The announcement, dated April 24, 2026, was published by the Universal Commerce Protocol through Newsfile Corp. The five new members join founding Tech Council participants Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair.

The expansion marks a turning point in the governance structure of an initiative that began as a tightly controlled group of tech and retail players in January 2026. Three months on, the protocol is attracting companies with very different - and in some cases previously conflicting - positions on how open agentic commerce infrastructure should be.

What the UCP Tech Council does

The Tech Council is not simply a roster of endorsing companies. According to the announcement, it aligns UCP's technical direction, reviews contribution proposals, and stewards the open-source protocol to ensure it evolves to meet the needs of businesses, platforms, developers, and consumers. The distinction matters: endorsers can signal support, but council members shape what the protocol actually becomes.

According to the press release, "the Tech Council aligns UCP's technical direction, reviewing contribution proposals and stewarding the open-source protocol to ensure UCP evolves to meet the needs of businesses, platforms, developers and consumers."

All members, new and founding, are described as advancing UCP's technical evolution and driving its adoption as the industry's open standard for agentic commerce. More details are available on GitHub, according to the announcement.

The protocol's architecture

UCP is structured in four layers. Services sit at the top, representing the different commerce verticals - Shopping and Common are launched, with other vertical services marked as expandable in future. Below services come Capabilities, which represent the core features the protocol supports: Catalog, Cart, Checkout, Order, and Identity Linking are all present at launch. Extensions sit beneath capabilities, encompassing both UCP-defined and custom schemas for discounts and other use cases. The fourth layer, Transports, forms the communication layer enabling merchants and agents to interact in the medium of their choice. Four transports are specified: REST, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, and Embedded Protocol.

On one side sit Consumer Platforms - platforms consuming services provided by business platforms, with Gemini cited as an example. On the other side sit Business Platforms - merchants and businesses providing services such as checkout and order management. Between them, UCP's Capability Discovery and Payment Handlers govern how both sides find each other and transact.

When Google and its founding retail partners first announced UCP on January 11, 2026, the protocol was positioned as an open standard covering the full shopping journey, from product discovery through to post-purchase interactions, across any platform and with any payment processor. The announcement at the time coincided with Google's introduction of three related protocols - MCP, A2A, and Agent Payments Protocol - alongside new advertising features for high-intent shoppers.

Amazon's participation - a notable shift

Among the five new members, Amazon's presence draws particular attention. The company had, until now, occupied an openly adversarial position toward third-party AI commerce infrastructure. Amazon blocked AI bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Huawei on August 21, 2025, while simultaneously developing its own proprietary agentic shopping tools. The company then updated its Business Solutions Agreement in February 2026 to introduce a formal Agent Policy, effective March 4, 2026, requiring AI agents to identify themselves and comply with new contractual requirements.

Amazon's Rufus AI shopping assistant reached 300 million users and drove $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025, according to the company. Its Buy for Me feature, which purchases items from third-party brand websites on behalf of customers, grew from 65,000 available products at launch to more than half a million. That scale gives Amazon significant leverage in any standardization effort it chooses to join.

Joining UCP's Tech Council does not mean Amazon has abandoned its own agentic commerce strategy. Rather, it positions the company inside the governance process for a standard that, if it gains broad adoption, will shape how external agents interact with every retailer. Being inside that room looks different from being outside it.

Amazon's Rufus AI assistant narrows product recommendations to approximately five named products, filtered through its COSMO semantic knowledge graph, which reads structured backend attribute fields. That architecture is entirely proprietary and separate from UCP, but the broader trend it represents - AI systems as the primary interface for product discovery - is precisely the problem UCP is designed to solve at an industry-wide level.

Stripe's dual role

Stripe is another new member with a complex prior history in this space. The payment processor was already deeply embedded in the agentic commerce ecosystem before today's announcement. Stripe co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI when the latter launched Instant Checkout for ChatGPT on September 29, 2025. That protocol competes, at least conceptually, with UCP's own payment and checkout specifications.

Stripe's participation in Microsoft's Copilot Checkout, launched on January 8, 2026, alongside PayPal and Shopify, further illustrates how the company has positioned itself as a neutral payment infrastructure layer willing to work across competing platforms. Joining UCP's Tech Council extends that logic to the protocol governance layer.

What each new member brings

According to the announcement, "each new partner brings deep expertise in how commerce and payments operate at a global scale." The press release groups the rationale more broadly than naming company-specific contributions.

Meta brings social commerce scale. The company phased out Facebook and Instagram Shops checkout in June 2025, transitioning to website-based transactions - a decision that, in hindsight, may have been partly preparation for a standardized protocol layer to replace proprietary checkout pipes.

Microsoft arrives with its Copilot ecosystem, which already connects more than 192,000 retailers through the Copilot Merchant Program launched in April 2025. Microsoft's Copilot Checkout, built with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe, produced internal data claiming 53% more purchases within 30 minutes and 194% higher conversion when clear shopping intent was present - though actual conversion outcomes for at least one major retail partner were considerably more modest.

Salesforce contributes enterprise CRM and commerce infrastructure connecting merchants of all sizes. Its Commerce Cloud platform sits beneath a significant share of mid-to-large retailer operations worldwide, making it a relevant voice in discussions about how UCP integrates with existing back-end commerce systems.

What the founding members say

Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM, Ads and Commerce at Google, commented in a post on LinkedIn on April 24, 2026: "The future of commerce is agentic, and building that future requires deep industry collaboration. Today, we're reaching a major milestone." Her post announced the expansions and welcomed the new partners.

According to the press release, Srinivasan stated: "The Universal Commerce Protocol is quickly paving the way for this new era of agentic commerce. We're proud to see the industry come together around this shared, open standard that will benefit businesses and consumers everywhere."

Vanessa Lee, VP Product at Shopify, added in the press release: "Our objective is to build a protocol that works at the scale commerce operates. AI can enable so many new ways of shopping to flourish, but only if there's a clear standard between retailers, businesses and applications. We're thrilled to be joining forces with more contributors to make this real."

Mani Fazeli, VP of Product at Shopify, commented on the LinkedIn post: "It's been incredible building this together, and now we have the brightest minds in the industry coming together to take it even further. Welcome to all."

Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google, commented on the same post: "Excited to welcome Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe to the UCP Tech Council -- joining Google and other founding members like Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Walmart... looking forward to building the future together!!"

Where UCP stands technically

Google's Merchant Center published a formal UCP help page on March 2, 2026, filling a gap that had left many e-commerce operators uncertain about how - and whether - to participate. That documentation clarified a confusion that had persisted since January: how UCP-powered checkout differs from Google's separately announced agentic checkout feature. According to the help page, Google's agentic checkout feature buys things on a customer's behalf directly on a merchant's website. UCP, by contrast, is the protocol that standardizes the programmatic exchange of information - via API, MCP, or A2A - between the AI agent and the merchant's backend, enabling a broader set of commerce journeys including product discovery and checkout inside Google AI Mode and Gemini.

The transport flexibility is technically significant. Merchants can expose capabilities through REST APIs with OpenAPI 3.x documentation, through MCP for direct LLM tool calling using OpenRPC schemas, through A2A for agent-to-agent communication, or through an embedded protocol that allows businesses to inject interfaces into host platforms. This architecture avoids forcing merchants into a single integration pattern and potentially reduces the bilateral partnership negotiation that has historically fragmented commerce infrastructure.

The embedded protocol, in particular, supports scenarios where checkout sessions require complex logic that simple API negotiations cannot handle - customized product configuration, subscription tier selection, or interdependent inventory choices. In those cases, a business can provide a URL rendering its own interface within the AI platform's context.

The question of fragmentation

The announcement claims the industry is "converging on UCP as the single open standard for agentic commerce." That claim deserves scrutiny. Two competing protocols remain active alongside UCP. OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol, introduced in September 2025, underpins ChatGPT's Instant Checkout and Walmart's original integration. Walmart's experience with that implementation was instructive: the retailer reported that Instant Checkout in ChatGPT converted three times worse than click-out links, prompting a strategic shift toward a different model.

That performance gap did not stop Microsoft from claiming its own AI shopping infrastructure produced dramatically higher conversion rates in some contexts. It does suggest the actual consumer experience with agentic checkout is more complex than protocol architecture alone can determine.

The addition of Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe to the UCP Tech Council does not eliminate these competing standards. What it does is add five organizations with substantial market weight to the governance of a single standard. Whether that weight translates into developer adoption, merchant integration, and consumer experience improvements depends on what the Tech Council actually does next.

Target and Walmart's early implementations demonstrated that UCP-based checkout inside Gemini and AI Mode in Search works technically. Target enabled consumers to discover and purchase products through conversational queries in Gemini from launch day in January 2026. Walmart's integration accesses purchase history from both online transactions and in-store shopping tracked through the retailer's app or membership programs. Those early commercial implementations provide a reference point new council members can build from.

Why this matters for marketing

For digital marketing professionals, the expansion of the UCP Tech Council carries concrete implications. AI agents handling product discovery, comparison, and checkout compress or eliminate several stages of the traditional purchase funnel. Advertising formats built around click-through rates and last-click attribution sit uneasily inside a flow where the agent selects products and completes transactions without a consumer ever seeing a landing page.

Google's Direct Offers format, launched alongside UCP in January 2026, attempts to insert advertising into AI Mode at the moment of high purchase intent. Whether that model scales across the broader UCP ecosystem - and how companies like Meta and Microsoft choose to monetize discovery within it - will shape the advertising economics of agentic commerce for years. Mastercard's Agent Pay infrastructure, announced on January 11, 2026, established cryptographic authorization mechanisms to verify that transactions initiated by agents were authorized by real consumers - a prerequisite for advertiser trust in any system where the agent is the last touchpoint before payment.

The convergence of five major platforms on UCP governance does not resolve questions about advertiser visibility, data sharing across participants, or how merchants should structure product data to maximize discoverability by AI agents. Those questions are becoming urgent. AI bot traffic to retail sites increased 5.4 times during 2025, according to Botify data. OpenAI's systems generate 198 crawls for every single visit they deliver to a retail website, per a March 2026 joint report from Retail Economics, AWS, Botify, and DataDome. Structured product data and protocol compliance are increasingly prerequisites for presence in AI-mediated discovery, not optional improvements.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council as new members. Founding members are Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. Key individuals cited include Vidhya Srinivasan (VP/GM, Ads and Commerce, Google), Vanessa Lee (VP Product, Shopify), Mani Fazeli (VP of Product, Shopify), and Nick Fox (SVP of Knowledge and Information, Google).

What: Five major technology and payments companies joined the governing body of UCP, the open standard that defines how AI agents interact with merchants across the full shopping journey, from product discovery through to post-purchase interactions. The Tech Council reviews contribution proposals, aligns technical direction, and stewards the open-source protocol.

When: The announcement was published on April 24, 2026, at 11:05 AM EDT, via Newsfile Corp. by the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Where: UCP is an open standard available through GitHub. The protocol operates globally, enabling commerce across any platform and with any payment processor. Press contacts listed are [email protected] and [email protected].

Why: As AI agents become a common interface for discovering and buying products, a shared open protocol is needed to avoid every platform speaking a different language. UCP addresses fragmentation across the full shopping journey. The addition of Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe deepens the governance capacity of the standard and brings in companies whose own agentic commerce infrastructure has, until now, operated largely outside or alongside UCP.

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