Digital Link CEO Paula Rivero will speak at the W3C/GS1 Workshop on E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents, taking place 8–9 September 2026 in Zurich. Jointly organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and GS1, and hosted at Google's Zurich offices as a hybrid event, the workshop brings together the organisations shaping how people, and increasingly AI agents, will buy and sell on the Web.
What is the W3C/GS1 Workshop on E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents?
The workshop is a two-day working session where retailers, brands, AI platform providers, payment networks and standards bodies examine how e-commerce content and infrastructure should evolve now that AI agents are becoming active participants in shopping. The programme spans the emerging agentic-commerce protocols (including MCP, UCP and ACP) alongside product discovery, connected packaging, trusted payments, verifiable credentials, and the question of liability when an agent transacts on a person's behalf.
Speakers and programme committee members include representatives of Google, OpenAI, Shopify and other companies building the agentic-commerce stack, together with the standards community of W3C and GS1. A question runs through the entire agenda: as commerce flows through AI intermediaries, how does the Web remain truly open, rather than fragmenting into closed or semi-closed ecosystems?
Why this workshop matters now
AI agents can already search, compare, check out and pay. Retail is simultaneously undergoing its biggest identification change in fifty years, as linear barcodes evolve into 2D barcodes that connect every physical product to the Web. These two shifts are converging fast, and the standards decisions made in rooms like this one will determine whether the resulting infrastructure is open, interoperable and brand-authoritative, or locked inside individual platforms.
For Digital Link, that conversation is home ground. It is where product identity, open Web architecture and the new agentic protocols meet.
Paula Rivero on the "last meter" of agentic commerce
Paula Rivero takes the stage on Wednesday 9 September at 14:20 CEST with a session on open, brand-controlled infrastructure for what she calls the last meter of agentic commerce: the moment when an AI agent must identify the exact physical product a person means.
The session starts from a deceptively simple observation: an AI agent can execute a purchase flawlessly and still buy the wrong product if it cannot pin down the precise item behind a name or description. As retail migrates from linear to 2D barcodes, the GS1 Digital Link standard creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to give every physical product a canonical, brand-controlled Web identity that any agent can resolve without requiring bilateral integrations between every brand, retailer and AI platform.
Agentic commerce is getting remarkably good at the transaction. The question we're bringing to Zurich is what happens one step earlier: how an agent knows, with certainty, which real-world product it is acting on. That answer should live on the open Web, controlled by the brand, readable by any agent, owned by no single platform.
The full session, titled "Oops! My Agent Bought It Again. Product identity at the last meter of agentic commerce," will be presented live in Zurich and streamed to remote participants.
About GS1 Digital Link
GS1 Digital Link is an open GS1 standard that expresses a product's identity, the same GTIN carried by barcodes for fifty years, as a Web address. One identifier on the pack can connect people and machines to authoritative, brand-controlled information: product data, usage instructions, certifications, recycling guidance, recall status and more. It is the bridge between physical products and the open Web, and a foundational building block for commerce in which humans and AI agents interact with the same trusted identity.
About Digital Link
Digital Link helps brands give every product a resolvable, standards-based Web identity built on GS1 Digital Link, from QR-powered consumer experiences on pack to the structured, machine-readable product information that search engines and AI agents rely on.
Event details
The W3C/GS1 Workshop on E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents takes place 8–9 September 2026, in Zurich and online. Paula Rivero speaks on 9 September at 14:20 CEST. The full programme is available on the W3C website. For interviews, meetings in Zurich during the workshop, or more information about product identity for agentic commerce, contact the Digital Link team.
