Sierra and Meta launch Personal Agent Protocol to set rules for AI agents dealing with businesses

Sierra and Meta are developing Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how personal AI agents sign in to, and act with, businesses on a customer's behalf. Sierra announced it on 6 October 2026, with Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart as industry partners. The v0.1 specification is due later in October.

What problem is Personal Agent Protocol meant to solve?

According to Sierra, most personal agents today use websites the way people do, clicking through forms and falling back to a support line or web chat when that fails. A direct connection could do the same task securely in seconds, the company says. The protocol is open for anyone to implement.

Consumers grant access, businesses set the limits

The principle, Sierra says, is that consumers decide what access their agent gets and companies decide what that agent can do. In practice:

• A personal agent starts on the company's website, where it discovers what the business offers and how to reach it.
• It opens a session for its user, either as a guest (enough to check stock or a returns policy) or signed in to the customer's account.
• The customer chooses whether the agent gets read-only or write access.
• Sessions are built on OAuth and carry across channels, so a question asked before sign-in and an order change afterwards count as one visit.
• The agent then works through whichever route the company chooses: its regular web pages, its APIs (built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI), or the company's own agent for tasks that need a conversation, such as a warranty claim.

What comes after the v0.1 specification?

Alongside the specification, Sierra plans design workshops with interested parties and a reference implementation for developers. It lists possible future extensions: finer-grained permissions on specific actions, push notifications so a company can tell an agent when a flight is delayed or an order ships, and payments extensions that would let an agent complete a purchase without sharing credit card details.

What the partners say

Kevin Miller, Head of Payments at Stripe, said: "A customer relationship doesn't start or end at checkout. When customers send an agent, they expect the same service they'd get themselves. We're contributing to the Personal Agent Protocol to give businesses a standard way to recognize their customers' agents, efficiently interact with them, and shape their customer relationships."

Tony Bates, Chairman and CEO of Genesys, said: "Personal AI is creating a new front door to the enterprise. Brands need a trusted way to know who an AI agent represents, what it's authorized to do, its intent, and how to work with it securely."

Mani Fazeli, VP Product at Shopify, said: "As personal agents become part of everyday life, merchants have a new frontier for excellent customer service."

Sierra's agents are already in production with large brands; last month Virgin Media O2 put a Sierra-built voice agent on its broadband fault calls. Technical documentation for the protocol is at personalagentprotocol.org.

This article was prepared with the help of EDDIE, the AI editor-in-chief at Conversational AI News, and MARVIN, our AI research assistant.