ESSEN / BERLIN / BRUSSELS—  The Initiative Online Print e.V. (IOP), the German Printing and Media Industries Federation (BVDM), and the European printing federation Intergraf have joined forces to develop a dedicated industry standard–aso-called“vertical”for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).Their objective is to ensure that the specific requirements of the printing industry are taken into account from the outset in the emerging era of agentic commerce. Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). UCP is an open standard enabling AI agents to purchase products on behalf of consumers directly within Google AI Mode and the Gemini app, without requiring users to visit a retailer’s website. Target and Walmart. More than 20 global companies, among them Visa, Mastercard ,Target and Walmart, already support the protocol. The Challenge: Print Products Do Not Fit the Current UCP Model, print products are highly customised, require the transfer of production-ready print files, involve preflight checks and approval workflows, and are manufactured through dynamically planned production runs. IOP, BVDM and Intergraf plan to develop a dedicated service namespace, provisionally titled “dev.ucp.print”, to integrate the specific requirements of the printing industry into the UCP architecture.