The Commerce Agent Protocol (ACP), The missing layer for autonomous trade

Over the past months, OpenAI and others have been quietly laying the groundwork for something bigger than chatbots, AI agents that can transact.

If you think about it, most of the world’s economy runs on forms, APIs, and spreadsheets, and almost none of it is machine-readable to agents. That’s what the Commerce Agent Protocol (ACP) aims to change.

ACP defines how a store, supplier, or API can expose their inventory, pricing, and ordering capabilities in a standard agent-readable format. This means an AI agent (like ChatGPT or a custom enterprise bot) can now browse, negotiate, and purchase directly — without scraping, forms, or manual integrations.

At Actory, we’re building on top of this emerging standard. Our goal:

To make global trade run itself.

We’re starting by helping Shopify merchants and suppliers expose their catalogs through ACP — effectively becoming discoverable to autonomous agents.

This is the first step toward a self-sustaining, 24/7 economy where software buys and sells from software — procurement, logistics, and payments happening in the background.

We believe agentic commerce will do for coordination what the internet did for communication.

The implications for efficiency, supply chains, and GDP growth are enormous.

If you’re working on agents, commerce infra, or want to collaborate on standards — let’s connect. email: khoos@actory.ai

My company routinely buys wholesale and an agent that does this on our behalf could be VERY cool. How many people are doing this already? How do you deal with anomalies?

Also, we're going to have to fire a bunch of staff if this progresses haha.