Meta and Sierra announce Personal Agent Protocol for business interactions
Meta and Sierra are developing an open standard for personal AI agents to interact with businesses, with customers controlling access and companies setting permissions. The first specification is planned for later in the announcement month, so this is an early-stage initiative rather than a finished rollout.
What changed
Sierra announced Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard being developed with Meta and industry partners including Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. It describes OAuth-based sessions that can carry across company websites, APIs and business agents. Customers would choose read-only or write access, while companies decide which routes and actions to make available.
Why it may matter for your work
Businesses could get a more consistent way to recognize customer-authorized agents and control what they can do. For support teams and merchants, this may reduce the need for agents to click through forms or call support to complete customer tasks.
What it can actually do
The proposed protocol supports discovering a business’s services, starting guest sessions for questions such as product availability, and authorizing account access. It describes connections through websites, MCP or OpenAPI interfaces, and company agents for conversational tasks such as warranty claims.
Limits to check
The protocol is still being developed. Sierra plans to publish the v0.1 specification later in the announcement month, host design workshops and publish a reference implementation. More detailed permissions, push notifications and payment extensions are described as possible future additions. It is open for anyone to implement; pricing is not stated.
“So today we’re excited to announce Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard Meta and Sierra are developing along with industry partners at Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart that defines how personal agents interact with businesses.”From the linked source page