BERLIN – Talon.One, a provider of enterprise promotion and loyalty technology, has announced the launch of its Unified Incentives Protocol (UIP). The initiative aims to standardize how brand incentives—such as discounts, loyalty points, and rewards—are communicated to and processed by AI shopping agents.
The move comes as the industry prepares for “agentic commerce,” a shift where AI agents (like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s models) increasingly act as intermediaries, discovering and purchasing products on behalf of consumers. Talon.One estimates that agentic commerce could capture up to 20% of the U.S. market share by 2030, creating a new requirement for brands: ensuring their promotional logic is machine-readable.
Bridging the Gap Between AI and Incentives
While traditional e-commerce relies on visual interfaces for humans, AI agents require structured, platform-agnostic data to evaluate the value of a transaction. The UIP is designed to surface these incentives across various AI-driven shopping journeys, preventing brands from being excluded from an agent’s decision-making process due to technical “blind spots.”
Alongside the protocol, Talon.One released its first building blocks: loyalty and discount extensions for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). While Google’s current UCP framework offers limited native support for loyalty programs, these new extensions allow UCP-enabled agents to:
- Access a customer’s real-time point balance and tier status.
- Calculate points earned or redeemed within a specific transaction.
- Support card-based loyalty programs without requiring complex identity linking.
“Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how customers discover and choose brands,” said Christoph Gerber, CEO of Talon.One. “In this new reality, incentives will be a core part of how value is communicated to AI agents.”
Market Context: The Evolution of “Omnichannel”
For senior marketers, the launch of UIP highlights two critical concepts currently reshaping the martech landscape:
- Machine-Readable Marketing: As AI agents move from “search” to “transaction,” the definition of SEO is expanding. It is no longer enough for a brand to be discoverable by a human; its value proposition—including complex loyalty tiers and personalized offers—must be “legible” to an algorithm. Brands that fail to standardize their incentive data risk being overlooked by agents programmed to find the “best value.”
- The Shift to Agentic Strategy: Industry analysts suggest that we are entering a third major disruption in modern commerce (following the shifts to e-commerce and mobile). This requires a transition from “omnichannel” to “agentic-ready” stacks. By centralizing incentive logic in a protocol like UIP, marketers can maintain control over their margins and brand equity, avoiding a “race to the bottom” where AI agents only prioritize the lowest base price.
Talon.One, which recently secured $135 million in growth funding, indicated it is developing additional extensions for other agentic platforms beyond Google, including anticipated support for OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s ecosystems.
As AI agents begin to “sign in” to merchant sites and execute checkouts, the integration of loyalty data into these automated flows will likely become a competitive differentiator for enterprise retailers.
