Incentives in the agentic future: Introducing the Unified Incentives Protocol

Agentic commerce marks a fundamental shift in how people discover, evaluate, and purchase products. In this new reality, no business can credibly claim to be omnichannel without accounting for AI-driven, agent-based shopping experiences.

For Talon.One, this means we need to enable our clients to succeed in this new reality.

At the center of this shift is discoverability of incentives. Agentic platforms need to be fully aware of the different ways in which your business’ incentives strategy can benefit a potential buyer. Making the agents aware of every single promotion, perk, and all the advantages of a loyalty program is essential to differentiate your business, and ensure that the agent understands why your brand offers the best experience for a potential customer.

That’s why we’re introducing the Unified Incentives Protocol (UIP). The UIP is a set of platform-agnostic standards that expose loyalty and promotion methods in a unified way, in all phases of the shopping lifecycle.

The first standard, available from today, is a UCP loyalty extension that captures Talon.One’s full loyalty feature set. This ensures that people shopping via agents like Gemini can see and benefit from the complete loyalty experience a brand offers.

This loyalty extension is the first building block of UIP, with more to follow in the coming weeks. Our ambition is that every Talon.One incentives mechanism - personalized promotions, enterprise loyalty management, offer management and execution and beyond - will be fully leveraged in agentic channels through UIP.

For agents to make meaningful decisions, they need a complete picture of how a brand creates value for a customer.

The Unified Incentives Protocol will mean AI agents have access to the same incentives customers see in any other channel: personalized promotions, discounts, bundles, loyalty points, perks, and program benefits. AI agents will be able understand all incentivization methods in a standardized, machine-readable format.

We are introducing UIP to support businesses with three key mandates to win in agentic commerce:

As commerce increasingly shifts toward AI-driven interactions, we saw the need for a shared, interoperable way to surface and apply incentives across AI platforms. We have been working on our agentic commerce strategy since the concept was first introduced in mid-2025. Now, Google’s recent announcement of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) gives us a practical platform to start bringing the Unified Incentives Protocol to life.

While UCP marks a big leap forward, its current scope is limited when it comes to promotions and loyalty functionality - primarily supporting coupons and basic discounts.

Talon.One’s UIP addresses what’s missing. It ensures that agentic platforms are aware of our full feature set, and that customers using Talon.One can be sure that their incentives strategy is fully understood by the AI agents searching for the best value proposition.

Importantly, while Google’s UCP supports the initial implementation of our Unified Incentives Protocol, the broader vision and future components of UIP extend beyond UCP and are not dependent on it.

Our first initiative under the UIP umbrella is a loyalty extension for Google’s UCP that captures Talon.One’s entire loyalty feature set.

As of now, UCP offers no native support for loyalty, making it difficult for brands with loyalty programs to differentiate themselves. This extension ensures that customers shopping through Gemini will be made aware of all benefits that any loyalty program powered by Talon.One offers.

This includes:

The loyalty extension is already live, with supporting documentation for customers looking to implement it. We will keep this extension continuously updated as the UCP specification evolves.

Talon.One is the most scalable incentives platform, trusted by the 300 of the world’s largest brands. We pioneered advanced promotions and loyalty program functionality - and with UIP, we’re extending that flexibility into agentic commerce.

Launching a full loyalty extension less than two weeks after UCP reflects both how quickly agentic commerce is evolving, and how seriously we view this transformation. We will also make sure other verticals such as QSR, travel and on-demand are fully supported in agentic purchasing experiences.

In just two decades, retail has already been reshaped twice:

Agentic commerce is the third major disruption in modern commerce.

This moment will fundamentally redefine how customers interact with brands and how value is communicated in the decision-making process. For businesses, it’s a rare opportunity to influence how agentic systems understand differentiation, loyalty, and long-term customer value from the very beginning.

We invite our customers to actively shape this shift: to champion agentic readiness internally, re-think how incentives are surfaced, and help define new standards for discoverability.

Done right, this isn’t just a platform transition; it’s a career-defining moment to lead the next era of commerce rather than react to it.