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Retail at a Crossroads:
The rules of agent-driven commerce
are being written now.

Agentic Commerce Commons (ACC) at MIT
8:30am–5:45pm, Friday, December 4, 2026
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT, bldg. E14, 6th floor  ·  Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Moment

One vision of agentic commerce resembles what happened to newspapers. In this version, centralized AI platforms absorb every product catalog and fully subsume product discovery. Sellers that today cover $43 trillion of B2C and B2B commerce become backend fulfillment and customer service centers.
A Better Vision
Our vision is different. A buyer should have an agent, a Buyer’s Agent, that has a singular responsibility to its human owner. A Buyer’s Agent can therefore build a more intimate understanding of its human’s needs and preferences, because it never violates their trust. Using this understanding, it gathers products that are a great fit for its human.
Similarly, a seller should have a Seller’s Agent that has a singular responsibility to the business.
Buyer’s Agents and Seller’s Agents find one another through a lightweight network to communicate about available products. No one (and no company) owns the lightweight middle where agents discover one another. It is a commons, an Agentic Commerce Commons (ACC).
Institutions supply key network services for the community such as identity, provenance, payments, and insurance.
Today’s architecture
ChatGPT, Gemini, …SHOPPERSLOGINRETAILERS UPLOADCATALOG
The Commons
Commerce CommonsCommerce CommonsSimple network that makes it cheapSimple network that makes it cheapand easy for a Buyer Agent interestedand easy for a Buyer Agent interestedin a product to find the Seller Agentsin a product to find the Seller Agentswho sell that type of product,who sell that type of product,and vice versa.and vice versa.
Identity, reputation, provenance, and payment services.
Why Join
How do consumers, retail brands, and financial institutions benefit?
Consumers
  • No one charges for placement, so prices are lower and profits are higher.
  • BuyerBots tirelessly read and warn each other about bad sellers and bad products, so the products you get are better.
  • Your data is not being used against you to unfairly charge you more or force your choices.
  • Because your BuyerBot is entirely yours, it’s safe to share your accounts and information. This lets your BuyerBot make shopping easier and more fun.
Retail brands
  • Reach buyers who you couldn’t afford to reach before.
  • No fee for placement, so profits are higher.
  • Shoppers interact directly with your brand. Prevents brands being intermediated from their customers as newspapers were.
  • A highly personalized feed converts better than an ad impression.
  • Fewer returns, because buyers are more informed.
Financial institutions
  • No hyperscaler fee stacked on top of yours in every transaction.
  • Grow beyond existing consumer and merchant customers to provide B2B and B2C identity, fraud prevention, insurance, settlement, etc.
  • Emerging opportunities to provide profitable new services.
Participants

This workshop will bring together retail and brand CEOs, commerce platforms, card networks and issuers, payment platforms, faculty, students, builders, investors, and infrastructure providers to examine and design an open network that directly connects Buyer Agents and Seller Agents.

If you are receiving this invite, it is because you have a reputation as a thought leader and expert. Participants will co-chair and/or contribute in working group breakout sessions during the workshop (topics listed below).
Outcome

Expert input gathered. Working groups and not-for-profit foundation formed. Provide results for larger group at National Retail Federation (NRF), Javits Center, NYC, January 10–12.

This is a convening of thought leaders to create a new open-source standard and not-for-profit foundation to support it. This is not a sales conversation.
When & Where

Friday, December 4, 2026, at MIT, bldg. E14, 6th floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 8:30am–5:45pm. Agenda and registration to follow.
Working Group
Topic Areas
The concept of a standard is evolving. Agents are capable of re-writing/extending protocols and changing behavior on the fly. Agents can also choose any market within which to participate, and rapidly switch. In the Darwinian selection of behaviors and markets, how do we design and incentivize a race to the top, rather than a race to the bottom?
01 Discovery, recommendation, & advertising
02 Identity, reputation, provenance, & dispute resolution
03 Monitoring, measurement, data, & privacy
04 Architecture & scaling
05 Simulation and benchmarking
06 Price negotiation & auction design
07 Agentic news & media commons
08 Organizational governance – the not-for-profit foundation
09 Merchant adoption
10 Consumer adoption
Foundation
and Research

An open source foundation provides protocols and community guidelines for the open network, with academic work contributing market mechanisms, measurement, and transparency so that the market can incentivize a race to the top.

An agent market
that brings together and extends existing protocols including UCP, ACP, AP2, and A2A.
A not-for-profit foundation
to steward mechanism design, measurement, and governance.
A shared simulation environment
for testing outcomes of proposed market mechanisms with optimal realism.
Design principles
Isonomic network design (“equal under the algorithm”) honors earned growth, selects against unearned increments, and makes the truth profitable. Low switching costs and high transparency incentivize a race to the top. Polycentric governance encourages broad participation.
A whitepaper is available on request.
Academic
Organizers

Academic sponsor: MIT Sloan School of Management
Co-organizers: Yiling Chen, Harvard; Vivek Farias and Negin (Nikki) Golrezaei, MIT Sloan
Lead organizer: Ben Vigoda, MIT Design Intelligence Lab
MIT Management Sloan School Harvard University MIT Design Intelligence Lab
SAVE
THE
DATE
Friday, December 4, 2026
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT, bldg. E14, 6th floor  ·  Cambridge, Massachusetts
8:30am–5:45pm
Agenda and registration to follow. To speak, sponsor, join a working group, or nominate a colleague, reply to AJ Abraham, workshop coordinator, info@agenticcommercecommons.org.

Register here   ·   Stay informed   ·   Download the save-the-date (PDF)
Agentic Commerce Commons (ACC) at MIT Massachusetts
Institute of
Technology