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On Friday, Sierra and Meta published Draft 0.1 of the Personal Agent Protocol, nicknamed "Poppy": the first draft of the rules for what your customers' AI assistants may do inside your business. More than forty companies have signed up to help design it, including Bank of America, Visa, United Airlines, Target and OpenAI. Stephen thinks this draft matters more to most companies than any AI model launched this year, and that every company should write its guest list now.
In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:
- What shipped. Sierra announced it last Tuesday with Meta, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart, then on Friday published the draft and 35 more design partners. These are design partners, not adopters. Project lead Bret Taylor co-founded Sierra and chairs OpenAI's board.
- How it works, in four ideas. A house-rules file on your website. Agents arrive as guests and must say who they are. Customers choose whether an assistant may only look or may also change things, and either side can revoke access. For anything that costs money, the customer approves the exact terms, and pressing the button twice buys it once.
- The sentence for your board. The draft says the customer's approval "works on trust." It doesn't prove the customer saw the terms, and it doesn't settle who pays when an agent gets it wrong.
- What's left out. Payments, notifications and attachments are open topics. Any part of the draft can change.
- Stephen's calls. Customer service: if your agent can't do the job, the customer's agent will sit on hold at your call center for free. Pricing: a bot never feels guilty leaving the cancellation flow. Brand: your website is about to have the same audience as the terms and conditions.
- Who's not on the list. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and Anthropic, as of Friday. Disclosure: Stephen's company runs largely on Claude.
- Fair to Sierra. Sierra sells the customer-service agents that one of the protocol's doors favors. But before Friday critics said there was no draft and no license, and Friday delivered both under Apache 2.0. A neutral governing body is still missing.
- The guest list. One page, four columns: what a guest agent may see, what a signed-in agent may see, what it may change that you can undo, and what moves money. Allow identified guests, limit changes to named permissions, require approval on your own page for money, and never give an agent full access. No code yet; policy first.
Sources:
- Sierra, "Sharing a draft of Personal Agent Protocol," 9 October 2026: https://sierra.ai/blog/poppy
- Sierra, "Introducing Personal Agent Protocol," 6 October 2026: https://sierra.ai/blog/introducing-personal-agent-protocol
- Personal Agent Protocol, Draft 0.1 specification: https://personalagentprotocol.org/docs/spec
- CNBC, 6 October 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/06/meta-joins-companies-to-tame-chaos-of-doing-business-with-ai-bots.html
The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.
