Can my agent buy me coffee beans?

I've been doing some research to try and come up to speed with UCP - Universal Commerce Protocol. UCP was created by Google earlier this year, with the intention of being a vendor-neutral protocol that facilitates safe involvement of agents in making financial transactions. UCP is supported by Shopify, so available on a huge number of small business storefronts. UCP is also supported by Stripe and by Salesforce, so relevant to B2B transactions. I am so impressed with the speed that UCP has rolled out on the merchant side, facilitated by these major platforms.

One of the things that is really interesting with these types of transactions is the deconstruction and rebundling of authorization, identity, velocity, approval, into a completely different flow diagram from a human-powered internet transaction.

Stripe owns Link, an agent wallet, with some nice approaches to approval and finding the right balance between fraud risk and approval velocity (you don't want to turn away so much legitimate business that it costs you more than the fraud would have). This is a set of business tradeoffs that is being forced to adapt at a more rapid pace than most of us are accustomed to.

I tested a personal Link wallet to see if my Hermes agent running on local inference on my personal machine could buy me a bag of coffee. The payment approval flow was very very nice, I got an out of band approval request in my Link mobile app for the exact purchase amount, then a one-time card number is issued for the purchase. I was surprised that link-cli doesn't yet have support for ucp, so the agent purchase was blocked by anti-bot tech on the human checkout page. I went through several turns of discussion with Link support before they talked to engineering and found that ucp support is feature-flagged right now. I expect it will be available soon - before I need to buy the next bag of coffee?

I was able to tell the agent to switch the shopify-cli, which did an approval process through Shop Pay and then did ucp checkout (and I did get my coffee beans). If you are someone responsible for creating business value, it's worth asking yourself if you are investing enough time in experimenting and learning about this new set of rules for how business is conducted. Shipping the existing backlog faster is a nice efficiency gain, but we are all going to hit a brick wall if we don't take time to look ahead and remember to invest in what is next.