Sierra and Meta propose a standard for personal agents to reach businesses
The proposed open protocol would let customers authorize AI agents while businesses choose the websites, APIs and services those agents can use.
A proposed connection between agents and companies
Sierra and Meta announced Personal Agent Protocol on October 6 as an open standard they are developing with business partners. Sierra names Genesys, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart among the participants. The goal is to give personal AI agents a consistent way to act for customers when dealing with companies, while letting each company decide what the agents can access. Sierra describes discovery through a company’s website and routes through its web pages, APIs or customer-service agent. These are design goals described by the companies, not evidence that the protocol is already operating across their services.
Permissions and the next milestone
Under the proposed design, an agent could start a guest session for a simple question and seek customer authorization when a task requires an account. Sierra says the session would use OAuth and distinguish read-only from write access. It also describes possible future extensions for more detailed permissions, notifications and payments. Sierra plans to publish a version 0.1 specification later in October, hold design workshops and provide a reference implementation. Until those materials and working integrations are available, claims about security, speed or broad compatibility remain to be tested in practice.