Welcome to the AI For Humans newsletter!

2025 was supposed to be the ‘Year of the AI Agent’ and if you look at the progress in the coding world through agentic tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex you might believe it.

But for non-coding uses, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.

Yes, Gemini & ChatGPT both have a ‘deep-research’ mode now which goes HAM on search but we haven’t exactly achieved the whole ‘go buy this thing and come back when it’s being delivered’ problem.

We've been promised AI assistants that do things for years. But AI that can actually transact (discover, negotiate, pay, track) requires infrastructure that didn't exist.

Until today. Welcome to the (terribly named) Universal Commerce Protocol.

So what is UCP exactly?

It's an open standard that Google launched at the National Retail Federation conference. They’ve already partnered with a ton of retail sites.

In layman’s terms, it’s a common language that lets AI agents handle your entire shopping journey from "I need a new suitcase" to "it's on your doorstep."

No custom integrations for every store. No janky handoffs between systems. One protocol to rule them all.

And, most importantly, lots of companies want to own the AI checkout moment.

Peak season is here. Most retail and ecommerce teams face the same problem: volume spikes, but headcount doesn't.

Instead of hiring temporary staff or burning out your team, there’s a smarter move. Let AI handle the predictable stuff, like answering FAQs, routing tickets, and processing returns, so your people focus on what they do best: building loyalty.

Gladly’s ROI calculator shows exactly what this looks like for your business: how many tickets AI could resolve, how much that costs, and what that means for your bottom line. Real numbers. Your data.

See your savings

OpenAI's got Instant Checkout. Amazon built something called "Buy For Me" that literally lets their AI shop on competitor websites (blowback ensued). Perplexity partnered with PayPal. They’d like you to form new shopping habits because there’s a ton of advertising and referral money to be made.

But all of these require custom integrations for every single retailer. They don't scale.

Google's bet with UCP is that they can become the universal translator, the one protocol that connects any AI agent to any store.

And if that happens?

Google becomes essential infrastructure for the entire AI commerce economy.

If you’re at all involved in buying or selling goods online for your business, I’d urge you to dig deeply into UCP as it may have a huge effect on how you operate going forward.

But for the rest of us, UCP points to how our interactions with AI will shift in 2026.

Agents (again, AI tools that do things for us) are arriving in a major way.

For example, the video below does a great job of explaining how the current Claude Code agent du jour ‘Ralph Wiggum’ is helping people complete coding projects just by continually asking the system to finish what it’s doing.

This is an entirely different way of looking at how we interact digitally vs our lives before. As we’ve started to see with Claude Code, AI agents are now doing real work in the world.

And UCP is significant because it’s the first time a major player has tried to standardize how agents operate at scale.

Up until now, these agents have mostly succeeded at limited use cases or in demo-like environments. But 2026 will be the year they really start to work as intended.

And it’s imperative that you understand how these systems work if you want to stay ahead of the game.

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You don’t have to wait to see how this plays out nor do you have to be technically advanced enough to implement ‘Ralph Wiggum’ within Claude Code.

There are many ways to start better understanding agentic AI today and getting your feet wet in terms of getting these AI to do your bidding.

Simple ways to explore AI agents right now:

Stop thinking of AI as "something I ask questions to" and start thinking of it as "something I delegate tasks to."

The agents are still pretty primitive, but they're improving fast. The people who learn to work with agents now will have a real edge when this stuff actually works.

We’ll see you on Friday for a new episode!

-Gavin

In this week’s AI For Humans: Robots, Robots and MORE AI Robots👇

There are so many good AI YouTube creators that it’s often easy to miss some real gems, especially when it comes to people sharing their workflows.

That’s why we were so excited to stumble onto David Unger’s channel and specifically this tutorial of how he took a famous scene from the original Jurassic Park and inserted characters from the ABC sitcom ‘Dinosaurs’.

The final product is really good but what we love about David’s video above is he shows how much work goes into getting things like proper textures right but never makes it seem impossible for the everyday human.

Remarkably he only has about 375 subs and he deserves a lot more. Go there and subscribe so we get a ton more of these vids in the future.