Ask your personal AI agent today to return a jacket, and it often signs in to the store with your account and clicks through pages built for people. The company has no standard way to guide it. That is how Sierra itself describes the problem, and the draft it released on 9 October is its answer.
Fact
The facts: on 9 October 2026 Sierra published a draft of Personal Agent Protocol, known as Poppy, and announced 35 additional design partners, among them OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Cloudflare and ElevenLabs. According to Sierra, they will take part in designing the draft with their feedback. The protocol was announced on 6 October as an open standard Meta and Sierra are developing; per the draft, the first partners are Meta and Genesys, Instinct, NiCE, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. The principle: the customer decides what access to give their personal agent, and the company sets what that agent can do. There are five building blocks. Discovery: the company publishes one file at a standard address on its website (/.well-known/poppy.json). Sessions: the agent starts on the customer's behalf, possibly as a guest, and identifies itself, so the company always knows an agent is acting. Sign-in: the customer signs in on the company's page through OAuth, and if the company permits it, the agent gets a token with only the access the customer approved. One session: the same token works for the company's APIs, its website and conversations with its agent. Getting the job done: through the website, through APIs built on standards such as OpenAPI and MCP, or through the company's agent, as the company decides. The protocol is built on OAuth, JWT, HTTPS, OpenAPI and MCP, and Sierra describes it as complementary to shopping protocols such as Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), not a replacement. Over the next month the company promises design workshops and a reference implementation.
Sierra's example says more than the five blocks. The agent returns the jacket: it finds the store through the protocol, identifies itself, you sign in once. The store knows it is dealing with an agent for a signed-in customer, and lets it start the return but not change the payment details on file. Under the draft, the customer gives the agent access to view, to make changes, or both, and the company decides which action requires which access.
At the door of an event, the guest with a badge and the one who slipped in behind him look the same until someone checks the list. Poppy is an attempt to give the agent a badge.
The agent stops pretending to be you. It says whose it is, and the company decides what it can do.
The list of 35 is assembled to impress, and it does. Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, where the payments run. Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Target and United Airlines, where people buy. And OpenAI. A design partner, in Sierra's words, takes part in designing the draft with its feedback. That does not mean the protocol already runs at that company, or that it will adopt it.
The liveliest part is the demo from Sierra Summit on 6 October. Alex McGillis of Rocket asks Muse, Meta's personal agent, to get him pre-approved for a mortgage. Muse finds Rocket's agent through Poppy and asks for permission, Alex signs in and shares his credit and income details, the two agents work through the price, the down payment and the interest rate, and within moments the letter is ready. The demo ran on Sierra's own stage. On 6 October the company promised a v0.1 specification later this month. The specification on personalagentprotocol.org is now labelled draft 0.1, updated on 9 October, and warns that any part of it can change before a stable version.
The draft is public, and Sierra invites every company to read it and help shape it. The test will come with the first company that turns the protocol on for its real customers.
Official primary sources
Sierra - Sharing a draft of Personal Agent Protocol, 09.10.2026Sierra - Introducing Personal Agent Protocol, 06.10.2026Personal Agent Protocol - specification, draft 0.1, 09.10.2026The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.