How do you trust an AI agent with your credit card? Today's payment systems create a "crisis of trust," blocking autonomous commerce with challenges in authorization, accountability, and agent "hallucination". In this episode, Shir and Ivan are joined by Prateek Dudeja, a Product Manager from the Agent Payments (AP2) team, to break down the new Agent payments protocol to finally let your agents securely transact in the real world.
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In this episode you will learn:
1️⃣ Why autonomous agents and current payment infrastructures are incompatible.
2️⃣ The three core challenges blocking agentic commerce: Authorization, agent error, and accountability.
3️⃣ How a role based architecture separates concerns, letting your Shopping Agent (SA) focus on logic while a specialized Credentials Provider (CP) securely handles payments.
4️⃣ Verifiable Credentials (VCs), and the critical difference between a "Cart Mandate" (for human present transactions) and an "Intent Mandate" (for autonomous, human not present tasks).
5️⃣ Deep dive to AP2 in our Q&A segment with Prateek Dudeja, a PM in the AP2 team.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:28 - Welcome & the problem with AI agent payments
01:07 - The "Crisis of Trust"
01:43 - Introducing: The Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
02:07 - Guest introduction: Pratik Duda
02:29 - The 3 challenges: Authorization, agent error & accountability
03:44 - How this relates to MCP & A2A protocols
04:33 - Key concept: A role based ecosystem
06:15 - Key innovation: verifiable credentials (VCs)
06:32 - The 3 types of mandates (Cart, Intent, Payment)
08:03 - The "Contractual Conversational Model"
08:29 - Walkthrough: Human present scenario (Concert tickets)
11:54 - The flow of trust: Allow lists & future standards
13:07 - Q&A with Pratik Duda
13:30 - Why a new protocol for payments?
14:42 - How will agents find trusted partners?
16:03 - Accountability: What happens when things go wrong?
18:04 - Demo: Reference implementation
19:43 - Compatibility with other frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI)
20:10 - How to get started
21:13 - The Future: Dynamic negotiation & agent commerce
22:58 - Conclusion & key takeaways
23:30 - Powering down
About The Agent Factory:
"The Agent Factory" is a video first technical podcast for developers, by developers, focused on building production ready AI agents. We explore how to design, build, deploy, and manage agents that bring real value.
? Resources & links mentioned:
➖ Agentic Payments Protocol (A2P) → https://goo.gle/4gF729h
➖ Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol → https://goo.gle/46vO1S4
➖ Model-Context Protocol (MCP) → https://goo.gle/4pAhAus
➖ Join the conversation in our community forum → https://goo.gle/3VwQbMk
? Subscribe to Google Cloud Tech → https://goo.gle/GoogleCloudTech
#AIAgents #AI #Payments
Speakers: Shir Meir Lador, Ivan Nardini, Prateek Dudeja
Products Mentioned: AP2, A2A