What is agentic gifting?
Agentic gifting is when an AI agent finds a real gift for a person, buys it and has it delivered, with a human approving the spend. Gratos is an agentic gifting service: it finds and prices gifts at real stores, and buys one only after the exact total is approved.
Updated
Where should I start?
Three guides cover the wider field of agents that shop and pay:
- Agentic commerce protocols explained: the open standards agents use to find a store, prove who they act for, check out and pay.
- What is UCP?: the Universal Commerce Protocol, which lets agents and stores build carts and check out.
- Who's building agentic commerce in 2026: the agents, retailers, payment companies and gifting services, and what each has shipped.
What does agentic gifting mean?
It is agentic commerce applied to gifts. An agent does the steps a person would: works out what the recipient would like, finds it at a store, prices it with tax and shipping, buys it and gets it to the right address. A person stays in charge of the money.
It is different from two nearby things:
- An AI gift finder suggests ideas and stops there. You still buy the gift. See AI gift finder or AI gift agent.
- "Agentic giving" is a separate term for charitable donations, used by Fundraise Up since July 2026 (Fundraise Up).
What is the agentic commerce stack?
The protocols and payment programs agents use to shop, checked October 29, 2026:
| Layer | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) | An open standard for agents that shop. Stores publish a profile at /.well-known/ucp; buying agents identify themselves with their own profile, sent with each request | ucp.dev |
| MCP (Model Context Protocol) | An open protocol for exposing tools to AI models. UCP's shopping service can run over it | modelcontextprotocol.io |
| ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) | From OpenAI and Stripe, Apache-2.0, launched 2025-09-29 | GitHub, Digital Commerce 360 |
| Visa Intelligent Commerce | Visa's program for payments made by agents, with signed agent identity through its Trusted Agent Protocol | Digital Transactions |
| Mastercard Agent Pay | Mastercard's program for payments made by agents, using tokenization and a signed record of the user's instructions ("Verifiable Intent") | ATXP, 2026-03-22 |
Gratos supports UCP; see What is UCP?. For the full map of protocols and how they fit together, see Agentic commerce protocols explained.
Who is building agentic gifting?
Several gifting companies now let AI agents send gifts. Most are built for business teams. As each describes it:
- Goody launched a Gifting MCP on 2026-06-25. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients, and its developer docs say spending is "always gated behind your confirmation" (press release, developer docs). Goody also launched an AI Gifting assistant in December 2025 (Goody, TechIntelPro).
- Sendoso released Sendoso MCP in beta on 2026-06-24, for revenue teams (Sendoso announcement, Sendoso MCP), and announced its Oso AI agent on 2026-03-18 (Sendoso).
- Snappy launched an AI Gifting Assistant ahead of the 2025 holidays (press release) and offers an MCP server that can create campaigns and send gifts (docs).
- Giftronaut offers MCP for gift cards, announced 2026-08-20 (Giftronaut).
Gratos works differently: it is itself a buying agent that shops real stores for its customers.
How do approvals and spend controls work?
An agent that spends money needs a person's say-so, and a way to prove it. In Gratos:
- Gratos stops before every purchase for approval of the exact total: the store's price, tax and shipping.
- The total is checked at checkout. If the store's total at checkout differs from it by more than 3 cents, Gratos stops before paying and nothing is charged (Terms).
- The card stays with the network. Gratos never sees your card number. Your card is saved as a card-network token, and each purchase uses its own one-time cryptogram. Each purchase is authenticated with the card network, using a passkey when the network asks.
- Roles on a team. Workspaces have owner, admin and member roles.
- Every approval is recorded: who approved, how the approval arrived, the amount and the time, kept for 7 years (Privacy Policy, §8).
Can I use Gratos with my AI agent?
Sign your agent in to your Gratos account, or have it text Gratos, and it can look for gifts and get them ready for you. Gratos stops before every purchase for approval of the exact total, so you decide what gets bought.
Questions
- Can an agent spend money through Gratos without a person?
Gratos stops for approval of the exact total before every purchase. Whether your agent can give that approval is up to you.
- Does Gratos support UCP?
Yes. For what UCP is and how it works, see What is UCP?.
- Does Gratos use customer data to train AI models?
No. We do not use your information or your recipients' information to train AI models (Terms, §4).