BOTTOM LINE UPFRONT
AI agents are becoming the new product discovery engine, and ACP will power that shift. When the capability becomes live in NetSuite, organizations that have already strengthened their product data and commerce workflows will be best positioned to capture high-intent demand and lead in the next wave of AI-driven commerce.
Overview
In this article, we explore how the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is reshaping product discovery and sales by enabling AI agents to recommend options, evaluate products, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers and businesses. We outline practical steps organizations can take to prepare for this shift and highlight real-world ACP use cases across industries selling both physical and digital goods.
This article is written for commerce, finance, and IT leaders. It covers strategic implications, operational opportunities, and high-level implementation considerations.
Disclaimer: ACP functionality is not yet available in Oracle NetSuite. However, Oracle announced ACP support on its product roadmap at SuiteWorld 2025. This article is intended to help organizations prepare for eventual availability.
Executive Summary
The way people discover and purchase products is undergoing a major transformation. Just as search engines revolutionized digital discovery two decades ago, AI agents are now emerging as trusted advisors that synthesize user preferences, evaluate options, and execute commerce transactions.
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe and already supported by platforms such as Salesforce, Shopify, and Etsy – with NetSuite on the horizon – creates a standardized framework for AI-driven commerce. ACP enables AI agents to surface products, present curated recommendations, and complete secure checkouts within a single conversational interface.
This shift represents both a strategic opportunity and a competitive imperative. Early adopters will gain visibility in AI-driven discovery, reduce friction in the buying journey, and establish a presence in a new, high-intent distribution channel. This article highlights what ACP is, why it matters, real-world use cases, and how your organization can prepare for this rapidly emerging AI-native commerce landscape.
1. The new commerce landscape: From search to conversation
Before search engines, commerce relied heavily on word-of-mouth and expert referrals. Search engines expanded reach but stripped away the recommendation layer. Today, AI agents merge the best of both:
- Trusted recommendation (personalization, context, preferences)
- Scalable discovery (instant access to millions of products)
When an AI agent recommends a product, it’s acting as a trusted advisor that has already evaluated options against the user’s specific needs.
Consumers and businesses are already shifting behavior
Instead of jumping across websites, comparing items in multiple tabs, and navigating different checkout flows, users increasingly describe what they need in natural language – and expect the AI to do the rest.
Examples include:
- B2C: “I need a birthday gift for my wife who likes gardening, budget around $75.”
- B2B procurement: “Find me 500 units of stainless steel bolts, M8x20mm, grade 316, delivered to our Chicago warehouse by next Friday.”
- Software licensing: “Our team has grown to 50 people. Upgrade our project management software licenses and add the premium analytics package.”
- Inventory planning: “Stock our three retail locations with Valentine’s Day inventory by January 15th, based on last year’s sales patterns.”
These interactions collapse the discovery, evaluation, and purchase cycle into a single conversational workflow.
2. Real-world applications across industries
ACP is applicable across a broad range of industries:
- Manufacturing & Distribution: AI agents can interpret technical specifications and match them to available inventory, verifying compatibility and surfacing documentation.
- Retail: AI agents can curate products for events, outfits, dietary needs, or gift-giving – capturing full-basket purchases rather than single items.
- Software & Licensing: License upgrades, provisioning, and billing adjustments become instantaneous.
- Professional Services: Agents can assemble service scopes, propose package options, and facilitate kickoff with pricing and timelines.
These use cases demonstrate the magnitude of AI-driven purchasing and the opportunity to meet customers at their actual decision-making point.
3. The strategic opportunity for organizations
A high-intent commerce channel
Users who ask an AI assistant to source products or manage procurement are already expressing active intent. ACP enables merchants to appear directly within that high-intent moment.
Dramatically reduced friction
Traditional ecommerce includes multiple steps that create abandonment risk. ACP condenses all stages – search, comparison, selection, checkout – into one conversation.
AI discoverability becomes the new SEO
Just as SEO once determined visibility, AI-native discoverability will determine which products AI agents recommend.
Merchants who prepare early gain:
- Experience optimizing for AI-driven recommendations
- New customer acquisition channels
- Competitive intelligence on conversational commerce behavior
4. Understanding ACP – and where NetSuite fits with MCP
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) creates an open standard that allows AI agents, businesses, and payment systems to communicate using a structured, secure, and machine-readable format. ACP does not replace existing ecommerce infrastructure – it serves as an intelligence-access layer that makes current capabilities available to AI agents. Specifically, ACP enables organizations to:
- Expose standardized product and pricing data
- Present options dynamically based on user intent
- Support conversational checkout flows
- Execute secure, tokenized transactions
- Coordinate fulfillment, confirmation, and post-purchase updates
NetSuite’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) complements this by acting as the context provider behind the scenes. While ACP orchestrates product discovery and transaction execution, MCP gives AI agents access to the business’s operational data – inventory, pricing, customer information, order history, and other contextual signals that help the AI understand the real-time state of the business.
Together, MCP and ACP allow AI agents to both know (via MCP) and act (via ACP) on behalf of users. When ACP becomes available in NetSuite, the combination will enable true end-to-end AI-native commerce: informed recommendations, intelligent workflows, and secure purchases in a single conversational interaction.
5. Preparing for ACP: What business leaders should do now
By preparing now, organizations can move quickly once ACP becomes generally available in NetSuite and other enterprise platforms.
Commerce teams should:
- Standardize product attributes and data
- Ensure inventory, availability, and pricing are accurate
- Use industry-standard taxonomies
- Improve product descriptions for machine readability
Finance teams should:
- Evaluate pricing structures, discount logic, and subscription rules
- Identify governance and approval workflows for agent-driven purchases
IT and digital teams
- Assess data readiness for product feed exposure
- Ensure commerce workflows can support conversational checkout logic
- Review payment systems for tokenized credentials
- Prepare for API-driven interactions across systems
In short: organizations that invest early in data quality, structured product information, and governance will gain a first-mover advantage when AI-native commerce becomes mainstream.
6. Technical overview
ACP introduces a modernized architecture that prioritizes security, user control, and trust across every stage of the purchasing flow.
Secure payment tokenization
ACP uses shared payment tokens that authorize specific transactions without exposing sensitive financial data. These limited-scope credentials are time-bounded, merchant-scoped, and fully auditable to maintain trust and security.
Explicit user authorization
ACP requires users to explicitly confirm each purchase initiated by an AI agent. This ensures agents act only with clear consent, supporting both user trust and regulatory compliance.
Merchant controls & risk management
Merchants maintain control through configurable limits, agent-specific rules, and existing fraud-prevention models. These safeguards ensure agent-initiated transactions remain aligned with internal policies and risk tolerances.
Compliance and “know your agent” requirements
ACP introduces new governance needs, including the ability to identify which agent is acting and confirm what it is authorized to do. Organizations must maintain clear audit trails to demonstrate compliance with internal controls and external regulations.
Dependence on high-quality, machine-readable data
AI agents rely on structured, accurate, and complete data to evaluate products and execute transactions effectively. Merchants must maintain precise product, pricing, availability, and delivery information to minimize errors and reduce friction.
Payment system readiness
Payment providers must support tokenized credentials and expose ACP-compatible endpoints. They also need to validate merchant authorization scopes and maintain auditable logs for all agent-initiated transactions.
Implementation & testing considerations
Organizations testing ACP workflows should validate data completeness, pricing logic, fulfillment edge cases, and subscription flows. They also need to evaluate how conversational agents handle ambiguity, missing data, and order-change scenarios.
Governance and trust as competitive differentiators
AI agents will prioritize merchants with accurate data, transparent pricing, and reliable fulfillment performance. Companies that invest in operational rigor and data quality will emerge as trusted, repeatedly recommended vendors as agentic commerce scales.
7. The Accordion Advantage
NetSuite ACP expertise
As a NetSuite partner with deep experience in commerce implementation and AI enablement, Accordion is well positioned to help organizations prepare for ACP. Our team understands both the technical requirements of ACP integration and the broader business implications of AI-driven commerce. We bring extensive expertise across NetSuite’s architecture, commerce modules, and AI connector services, including Model Context Protocol (MCP), and provide guidance on how MCP and ACP work together to create AI-native commerce capabilities.
Strategic assessment & planning
Accordion helps organizations evaluate ACP readiness and develop practical implementation roadmaps, including:
- Readiness assessments: Reviewing product catalog structure, data quality, and commerce infrastructure
- Opportunity sizing: Estimating potential revenue impact from AI-driven commerce channels
- Implementation planning: Prioritizing use cases and defining phased rollout strategies
- Competitive positioning: Advising on AI discoverability and conversational commerce optimization
These services equip leadership teams with the insight needed to make informed decisions around timing, investment, and strategic positioning in the AI commerce era.
Implementation support
Once ACP becomes available in NetSuite, Accordion will provide full implementation support, including:
- Product feed preparation and optimization
- Conversational checkout configuration and testing
- Payment integration and security enhancements
- Post-launch monitoring and performance optimization
Our goal is to ensure clients not only activate ACP, but also optimize it for maximum impact – turning AI-driven product discovery into completed transactions and stronger customer relationships.
The time to prepare is now
ACP represents a major evolution in how products are discovered and purchased. As AI-driven discovery grows, businesses that prepare their product data, commerce systems, and checkout workflows today will be best positioned to capture demand tomorrow.
Organizations today face a strategic choice: lead in the shift toward agentic commerce or risk being left behind in channels where AI drives visibility and customer decision-making.
The question isn’t whether conversational commerce will transform your industry. It’s whether your organization will be ready to lead.