Over the past quarter, Google released an agentic commerce standard, representing a major threat to Amazon’s deeply entrenched e-commerce business, and Anthropic is now going after IBM’s mainstay mainframe business with new coding capabilities that threaten to reduce the industry’s dependency on legacy systems.
In recent weeks, Google announced an agentic Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to eliminate the need for retailers to maintain complex infrastructures necessary to shore up their online purchasing lifecycles. This common language works across agents and systems to standardise most of the purchase journey, including authentication, payment, and fulfilment. The alternative has been for DevOps team members to painstakingly integrate connections between various systems and partners, a major roadblock in efforts to digitise companies. Professional services required to connect infrastructure and modern applications are expensive and not always readily available.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
“Google’s quest for a de facto agentic commerce standard is a major blow to its hyperscaler rivals, as UCP reduces the need for bespoke integration work, ultimately shifting leverage from competing platform services,” said Charlotte Dunlap, GlobalData research director. “It also addresses commerce partners’ strong desire to optimise AI to help drive new revenues.”
In the same quarter, Anthropic revealed to its broad developer base new features within Claude Code, which can modernise legacy programming language COBOL. The language was created in 1959 but remains in use, shoring up multiple government and banking transactional processing systems, including IBM mainframes.
“Refactoring legacy code like COBOL represents a daunting task even among the industry’s most skilled coders,” Dunlap said. “If Claude Code can significantly cut that learning curve via GenAI automation, the features represent a major new app modernisation opportunity for enterprise developers to chase.”
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalData
