Sierra has released version 1.0 of Personal Agent Protocol, or Poppy, a standard for how personal AI agents (software that acts on a person's behalf) deal with companies.
The launch comes with distribution attached. Shopify has turned Poppy on for every store on its platform. Meta's Muse agent now looks for the protocol on every site it visits. More than 100 companies have signed up, according to the announcement.
That pairing is the interesting part. A protocol is a shared set of rules, and it is only useful when both parties follow it. Agent makers want sites that respond in a predictable way, and businesses have little reason to build for agents that never show up. Poppy starts with a large merchant platform on one side and a major agent on the other, which sidesteps the chicken-and-egg problem that stalls many standards.
The closest familiar comparison is robots.txt, the plain text file that tells web crawlers what they may do on a site. It became a default because crawlers and site owners both honored it, not because anyone enforced it. Poppy is aiming at a similar position for agents, though the stakes are higher when an agent is dealing with a customer's orders and accounts rather than just reading pages.
The source leaves several things open: what Poppy lets agents do, who governs future versions, and whether agent makers other than Meta will look for it. Shopify's switch gives the protocol wide reach on day one. Whether it becomes the common standard depends on how many other agents follow Muse.