Sierra co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor have announced in a post that the Personal Agent Protocol, or Poppy, has reached version 1.0. The protocol sets out how personal AI agents deal with a business through its customer service agents, website and APIs. It is led by Meta and Sierra.
Several other things were announced at the same time. Shopify is switching on Poppy for every merchant on its platform. Design partners including Mercury, Synchrony and Turkish Airlines are going live in production. And Meta's personal agent Muse now has Poppy enabled by default for all users, checking for it on any website it visits.
What changed over five weeks
A public draft sat between the first release and 1.0. Sierra says 1.0 folds in feedback from design partners, who spent the past five weeks testing the draft against real websites, APIs and agents. There are four main changes:
- Businesses can adopt it in stages, starting with the basics and adding features gradually.
- The way it uses existing standards such as MCP, OpenAPI and UCP has been reworked.
- Businesses can give visiting agents more guidance, and can also collect feedback from those agents.
- A new extension mechanism lets industries add their own pieces outside the core protocol. The first is a commerce extension that Shopify helped draft.
Authorization runs on OAuth. Users decide what an agent may and may not do, and can revoke that permission at any time. Sierra also provides an implementation toolkit with a validator, so businesses can check for themselves whether they have connected correctly.
How it divides the work with UCP and MCP
Set Poppy beside the protocols it is often grouped with and the division of labor looks roughly like this. MCP covers how a model calls tools. OpenAPI describes what an interface looks like. UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol that Shopify supports by default, handles finding products, adding them to a cart and checking out. Poppy handles the step before all that: when an agent arrives at a store, it announces who it is and works out what it is allowed to do.
The commerce extension drafted by Shopify links Poppy and UCP. An agent can shop as a guest or sign in to a customer account, and some actions require the agent to ask the customer first. It also connects to UCP Ask, which lets a customer's agent talk directly to the store's own agent.
The businesses already live use it in different ways. Mercury users can have an agent check balances, review recent transactions and categorize spending, and can also start payments or transfers, though those requests must first pass the account's approval rules. Turkish Airlines has opened up fare, flight status and layover lookups, and retrieves bookings with a booking reference and surname. Frequent flyers can ask an agent to find business-class upgrades, with the traveler confirming in person before payment. Synchrony is still in the exploration stage. The aim is to bring its installment and rewards options into agent-led shopping, across its more than 500,000 merchant locations.
A long partner list, a short list of agents
The 60 new design partners include Salesforce (covering Agentforce and Commerce Cloud), Delta Air Lines, Hyatt, Intuit, Zoom and Twilio, spanning finance, insurance, travel and enterprise software. We previously reported that OpenAI joined at the draft stage; Sierra's announcement does not say when OpenAI's agent will enable Poppy by default.
The announcement names only one personal agent that is already on by default for all users: Meta's Muse. Adoption on the business side is growing fast, but the range of visiting agents has not caught up. There is no public word on when larger assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude will support it. The partner list leans heavily toward US and European companies, and there has been no public move yet from e-commerce or payment companies in China toward a comparable agent-access standard.
Sources: Sierra official blog, CocoLoop; the Sierra announcement was used to verify the design partner count, the list of live businesses and the changes in version 1.0.