What’s crystallizing is not a single winner but a layered protocol stack that will define the agentic economy for the next decade. Here’s how the pieces fit together.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) has won this layer. With 97 million monthly SDK downloads, adoption by every major AI platform, and governance under the Linux Foundation, MCP is becoming what TCP/IP was to the internet.
Alongside MCP sit A2A (agent-to-agent communication), AGENTS.md (project instructions for coding agents), and goose (reference agent framework).
Strategic implication: The foundation layer war is over. Investment here is table stakes, not differentiation.
Commerce Layer (Active Competition)
UCP (Google) represents the full-journey model—a protocol optimized for surfaces where advertising can be embedded throughout the customer journey.
ACP (OpenAI + Stripe) represents the transaction-completion model—optimized for capturing value at conversion without requiring visibility into the full journey.
Strategic implication: Merchants will need to support both protocols. Which becomes primary depends on where users spend time and which attribution system advertisers trust.
Google’s approach: Embed advertising into the commerce protocol itself. You can’t use UCP without participating in Google’s ad ecosystem.
OpenAI’s approach: Separate advertising from commerce. The commerce protocol is monetization-agnostic—at least for now.
Attribution Layer (Undetermined)
This layer doesn’t exist yet—and whoever builds it may win the entire war.
A potential “Agentic Attribution Protocol” under the AAIF could become the neutral standard—but “neutral” standards tend to favor their creators.
Strategic implication: Watch for attribution infrastructure announcements. The company that gets advertisers to accept its measurement as truth captures the economic logic of the entire ecosystem.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
