Between September and December 2025, five different payment protocols for AI agents launched:

• Google's Agent Payments Protocol
• Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol
• Mastercard's Agent Pay
• Stripe and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol
• Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (January 2026)

Multiple vendors rushing to standardize the same capability simultaneously marks where deployment pressure concentrates. Connectivity has become table stakes.

What Non-Negotiable Stakes Reveal

Commerce forces a different reliability threshold than browsing or summarization. Agents spending money changes infrastructure requirements categorically. Audit trails must survive disputes. Rollback mechanisms for failed transactions. Fraud detection working at agent speed. Compliance reporting satisfying regulators. Payment protocols address transactions and everything that makes transactions defensible in production.

Visa predicting millions of consumers using AI agents for purchases by the 2026 holiday season demonstrates timeline urgency. Commerce is becoming the first production-scale use case, proving out infrastructure patterns other domains will need. Transactions with real money require reliability that demo environments never test.

Why Connectivity Converged, Then Stopped Mattering

The Model Context Protocol moved from Anthropic announcement to Linux Foundation stewardship in roughly a year. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google all publicly embracing the same standard at that speed means connectivity was solvable. Straightforward enough that major vendors could align rapidly.

OAuth 2.1 support in June 2025 moved MCP from local machines to remote servers, making enterprise deployment architecturally viable. Block's rollout to thousands of employees shows what "architecturally viable" actually requires:

• Author all MCP servers internally for security
• Pre-install approved bundles
• Run weekly education sessions
• Maintain LLM allowlists and OAuth flows with tokens stored in native system keychains

Protocol standardization eliminated the N×M integration problem while exposing the operational complexity that lives underneath. What looked like a connectivity challenge turned out to have connectivity as its simpler layer.

Where Differentiation Moves When Connectivity Commoditizes

Google's managed MCP servers for BigQuery, Maps, and GKE implement the protocol and handle concurrency, authentication cascades, rate limiting, failure recovery, and audit logging. Microsoft integrated MCP into Windows 11 and Azure AI Agent Service. Cloudflare deployed MCP on Workers. The protocol is open, and the infrastructure making it production-viable is where vendors now compete.

Companies whose differentiation was connectivity face a changed landscape. The competitive surface has moved to operational reliability—making things run predictably when thousands of concurrent agents execute workflows involving real money.

Multiple payment protocols emerging in late 2025 indicates vendors understand payment infrastructure is where production requirements can't be deferred. Commerce creates stakes high enough that "mostly works" stops being deployable. Audit trails, rollback mechanisms, fraud detection, compliance reporting will eventually apply to healthcare agents, financial agents, infrastructure agents.

Protocol standardization made connectivity a commodity. Payment protocol proliferation shows where production deployment pressure concentrates. Infrastructure competition around managed services points to what the market is building: systems handling the operational complexity that appears when stakes are real.