Is Google building the highway and OpenAI the perfect car?
Laatst bijgewerkt: October 6, 2025
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Two giants, one future, two very different plans
Imagine the world of AI shopping is a new continent we are about to explore. To get there, we need infrastructure: roads, traffic rules, and vehicles. The two biggest mapmakers for this new continent are Google and OpenAI, and their approaches are quite different.
As a webshop owner, it’s crucial to understand which map to read.
OpenAI’s plan (ACP): the perfect race car for the shopping street
OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, have a very specific plan together with payment expert Stripe: the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
You can think of ACP as an ultra-modern, self-driving race car, specially designed for one purpose: to drive through the shopping street (the buying process) as quickly and smoothly as possible.
- It’s a specialist: The car is built only for shopping. It knows everything about checkout, inventory, and shipping options.
- Its strength is its focus: Because it only does one thing, it does it perfectly. The result is a super-fast, secure shopping experience within a chat.
- Who is it for? For every store that wants to win the race in ChatGPT’s shopping street.
Google’s plan (AP2): the universal highway for everything
Google is taking a different approach. Their plan, the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), is not a car, but a complete, universal road network.
AP2 is designed to connect any possible AI assistant with any possible online service. Shopping is just one of the many things you can do on this highway.
- It’s a generalist: The highway is not just for shopping, but also for booking flights, making reservations, or requesting information.
- Its strength is its reach: If Google connects this highway to all their other services (the Search Engine, Android, Google Assistant), everyone can use it. It will become the standard infrastructure.
- Who is it for? For any business that wants to be accessible via Google’s vast road network.
Luckily, you don’t have to find the way alone
This might sound like you have to choose, but fortunately, the ‘road builders’ and ‘traffic controllers’ are already there to help. Major payment companies like Mollie and Adyen are already building the ‘on-ramps and off-ramps’.
They ensure that your store, regardless of the system, can easily connect to both OpenAI’s specific racetrack and Google’s universal highway. Mollie acts as a ‘universal adapter’ for both, while Adyen works closely with Google to make their highway super secure.
So, what does this mean for you?
The conclusion is simple: you will soon need both a fast car and a connection to the highway. You want to offer customers coming from ChatGPT a perfect race experience, but you also want to be accessible to the millions of people on the Google highway.
So, the smartest strategy is not to choose, but to ensure that your ‘garage’ (your webshop system) is flexible enough. The engine (your products, prices, and inventory) remains the same. You just make sure you can put different types of wheels on your car, depending on the road you want to take.
Need to review the basics?
These protocols are the engine behind a new movement. Get the full context in our complete guide to Agentic Commerce.