Companies are left with two choices. They can block the agent or let it act with the customer’s full access.
Amazon chose to block. It cut off Meta’s Muse agent in September, PYMNTS reported Sept. 21.
Now, Meta and Sierra are offering a third option. Sierra is building the Personal Agent Protocol, known as Poppy, with Meta. Customers decide what their agents can access, and companies set limits on what those agents can do, PYMNTS reported Tuesday (Oct. 6).
Under Poppy, each company publishes one file at a standard address on its website, the Sierra blog post said. The file tells agents how to connect, how customers sign in and what an agent may do. The agent then opens a session and identifies itself, so the company knows an agent is acting and whom it represents.
An agent can start as a guest. That may be enough to check whether a product is in stock or ask about a return policy, according to the blog post. When a task needs the customer’s account, the customer signs in through the company’s own page. The same session carries across the company’s website, its APIs and its own customer service agent. A question asked before sign-in and an order change made after it count as one visit.
Once signed in, the customer decides whether the agent can view the account, make changes or both, the blog post said.
35 Partners From OpenAI to United Airlines Join Poppy
Sierra published a draft of the Personal Agent Protocol and named 35 new design partners, according to the blog post. They include OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Plaid, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chime, Target and United Airlines, along with insurers and media companies. They join Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart, PYMNTS reported Tuesday.
Rocket, one of the original partners, showed how Poppy works for a mortgage. In a live demo at Sierra Summit on Tuesday, Rocket Vice President of Digital Product Management Alex McGillis asked Muse to get him preapproved, according to the blog post. Muse went to Rocket’s website, found Rocket’s own AI agent and asked McGillis for permission to connect. He signed in to share his credit and income details. The two agents then worked through the purchase price, down payment and interest rate. Within moments, McGillis had a preapproval letter.
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Just 23% of Merchants Can Tell When an AI Agent Shops
Most merchants still can’t tell when an AI agent is shopping on their site. Just 23% can clearly identify AI-driven traffic and purchases, according to the July PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Agentic Commerce Deep Dive: Payment Infrastructure and the Path to Trust for Merchants,” a collaboration with Visa Acceptance Solutions. The report surveyed 1,185 merchants in the United States, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates in March.
Shoppers are moving faster and drawing their own lines. Nearly 132 million U.S. adults have made a retail purchase with AI assistance, according to the September PYMNTS Intelligence report “Will the 2026 Shopping Season Go Agentic?” Their trust stops short of the wallet, as the July report found that 56% of 5,241 consumers said they would let an agent search and compare products. Only 35% would give one access to saved payment credentials.
Poppy doesn’t handle payments yet. Sierra has listed payments extensions on its roadmap that would let an agent buy something without sharing credit card details, according to a separate Sierra blog post published Tuesday.
“A customer relationship doesn’t start or end at checkout,” Stripe Head of Payments Kevin Miller said in the Tuesday blog post.
The card networks are already building that layer. Visa has Trusted Agent Protocol, and Mastercard has Verifiable Intent. Both networks are now Poppy design partners as well. In September, they began working with Ant International on a shared framework for identifying AI agents, PYMNTS reported Sept. 10.
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