As the race to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence agents heats up, Klarna has announced support for Google’s open-source Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a neutral framework designed to connect merchants, consumers, and third-party platforms to enable agent-driven commerce.
AP2 supports multiple payment types, including debit and credit cards, stablecoin transfers, and real-time payments. However, it’s not clear how Klarna’s signature buy now, pay later services will integrate with the framework.
Individualized Shopping
The announcement follows last week’s news of a broader partnership between Klarna and Google Cloud aimed at enhancing personalization across Klarna’s platform. Under the collaboration, Google’s AI models will help create tailored visuals for Klarna’s e-commerce offerings and power customized marketing campaigns.
Personalization and hyper-personalization have been effective use cases for AI, and the technology has seen widespread implementation. With the continued growth of e-commerce and digital payments, companies have more access to consumer shopping and transaction data.
While once the domain of the largest merchants such as Walmart and Amazon, AI-driven personalization tools are now being adopted by smaller merchants to better understand customer preferences and deliver individualized recommendations.
In AI Agents’ Domain
Agentic commerce goes beyond personalized recommendations, placing the entire transaction process within the domain of AI agents. It has become a high priority for many of the world’s largest financial services firms, with both Visa and Mastercard introducing their own versions of the technology.
Google’s AP2 aims to serve as the foundational infrastructure—or rails—of this emerging ecosystem, and the tech giant has made significant progress toward that goal. In addition to Klarna, Google has attracted support from companies including Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Alipay, Coinbase, Etsy, and Intuit.
Yet despite this momentum, questions remain around the security and liability implications of agentic commerce—particularly when transactions go wrong. There’s also debate over whether consumer demand for AI-driven shopping experiences will be broad enough to justify large-scale investment in the supporting infrastructure.
Still, few doubt that AI will become an increasingly integral part of how people discover, evaluate, and complete purchases.
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