Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): What Google's new standard means for loyalty and promotions

Google and Shopify’s announcement of their Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) begins to answer those questions. Launched on stage at NRF, UCP is an open-source shared standard designed to help AI agents, commerce platforms, and merchant systems work together. It lays the groundwork for agents to discover products, identify customers, and complete purchases on behalf of users.

If you’re new to the topic, we published a back-to-basics guide on agentic commerce that explores what agentic AI is and why it matters, off the back of OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol announcement. UCP builds directly on this foundation. 

With that context, let’s look at what UCP actually introduces - and what it means for promotions and loyalty. 

UCP standardizes how commerce actions are executed between “consumer surfaces” (like Gemini) and merchant backends (such as Shopify and payments systems).

It introduces six core capabilities that together enable a basic agent-driven commerce experience, including product discovery, identity linking, checkout, and execution.

Introducing this structure is essential. Agents need well-defined data and rules they can reason against. By focusing on how actions happen - rather than why decisions are made - UCP creates a clean, extensible foundation for agentic commerce.

With that in mind, where do promotions and loyalty programs come in with UCP?

With UCP, promotions are an “Extension” of the Checkout Capability that businesses can enable. Once enabled, businesses can feed up discount data to the agents, and end users can see and redeem discounts in the agent surface.

The Discount Extension of the Checkout Capability governs how:

UCP’s supported promotions functionality is basic but on the right track. So far, it covers:

This isn’t about complex incentive strategy. It’s about making sure agents can execute promotions consistently and predictably.

Things get more interesting when promotions are combined with Identity Linking, one of UCP’s core capabilities. 

With Identity Linking, agents will essentially be able to “sign in” to a business’ website. This opens up earning loyalty value, AND redeeming loyalty rewards (through discounts) in agents.

Here are some of the use cases UCP opens up in agents:

Identity linking allows an agent to securely associate a user with their merchant account. That opens the door to loyalty use cases that go far beyond generic discounts:

While the current version of the UCP spec is too limited for all of Talon.One's capabilities, we are already actively working on an extension of the protocol that will enable all of Talon.One’s incentive mechanisms. 

For years, businesses have talked about “using their data better.” The difference now is that AI can't work around messy systems, it holds up the mirror and exposes them.

For many retailers, UCP will highlight the gap between the promise of agentic commerce and the reality of fragmented enterprise data. As Lukasz Sloniewski, CEO at leading loyalty and martech agency Omnivy, puts it:

In most organizations today, incentives are spread across systems:

As Lukasz notes:

In an agentic environment, this fragmentation becomes a real blocker. Agents can only reason over incentives if those incentives are consistent, explainable, and machine-readable.

The fix is not flashy, but it is decisive: centralize promotions and loyalty in one place, so every channel, and every agent, executes the same decisions.

UCP deliberately does not attempt to solve incentive strategy. And that’s a good thing.

By drawing a clear boundary between decisioning and execution, it allows merchants to innovate on promotions and loyalty without hard-coding strategy into agents or platforms. Identity becomes portable. Incentives become structured inputs. Control stays with the business.

At Talon.One, this aligns closely with how we think about promotions and loyalty: as independent decision systems that integrate cleanly with platforms, payments, and now AI agents. From a Talon.One perspective, this moment is particularly meaningful. As the only enterprise-grade promotions and loyalty engine deeply integrated with the Shopify commerce platform, we’re closely involved in how incentives evolve inside this new agent-led model. 

We’re excited to see Talon.One customers included in the initial UCP ecosystem and to continue exploring how incentives can be exposed to agents in ways that are standardized, explainable, and merchant-controlled.

What is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard developed by Google and Shopify that defines how AI agents interact with commerce platforms and merchant systems. It standardizes core commerce actions like product discovery, identity linking, checkout, and order execution so agents can reliably shop on behalf of users across different surfaces.

How do promotions and discounts work in agentic commerce?

In agentic commerce, promotions are surfaced and applied by AI agents during checkout based on structured data provided by merchants. With UCP, promotions are handled as an extension of the checkout process, allowing agents to discover eligible discounts, display them to users, and apply them consistently across channels. This requires promotions to be machine-readable and centrally managed.

Why do loyalty programs need centralized data for AI agents?

AI agents can only reason over loyalty programs if reward rules, eligibility, and balances come from a single, reliable source. When loyalty data is fragmented across e-commerce, POS, ERP, and CRM systems, agents cannot confidently apply rewards in real time. Centralizing promotions and loyalty data enables consistent execution and makes agent-driven commerce possible at scale.