Introducing Opal
When you think about AI agents visiting your website, you might imagine them reading your content, interpreting your product catalog, and gathering information to answer a customer’s question. Making that information accessible and understandable has been an important starting point for businesses preparing for AI.
In November 2025, we introduced Agent Score, a way for businesses to assess how well AI agents could understand and reason over the content of their websites. Since then, thousands of businesses have used it to see how agents experience their sites, where they encounter difficulties, and what needs to improve. Agent Score is also part of our partnership with Visa to help businesses prepare for agentic commerce.
That work is part of a larger evolution. As AI assistants become more capable of reasoning, planning, and using tools, customers can delegate more of the journey to them. An agent might arrive to find a suitable appliance and arrange installation, gather a quote for a home renovation, configure a product and prepare a cart, or change an existing reservation. Reading the website is one step in completing the customer’s request.
For a business, this changes what it means to be ready for AI. The agent needs access to accurate information, but it also needs a reliable way to interact with the business: ask a follow-up question, check availability, submit the right details, and take an action with the customer’s permission. The business needs a way to bring its own expertise, rules, and systems into that interaction.
Agent Score helps businesses understand their readiness. The next step is giving them a way to participate.
Today we’re introducing Opal, the agent interface for every business. Opal brings together a business’s knowledge and capabilities in an interface designed for customers and their AI assistants, making the information and services already available through its website accessible and actionable for agents.
We’ve built Opal to help businesses turn the functions their customers already use online into an agent experience they can own and improve.
Continuing the AI User Journey
Last year, we described the AI User Journey: a customer journey that begins in conversation with AI and continues across the places where people discover, evaluate, and buy. We explored what happens when a customer arrives at a brand website after a helpful, personalized conversation, only to start over with search boxes and filters.
We also explored what happens when they never visit the website at all.
Those ideas have shaped our work. In our original vision for the AI-powered web, we described a business-owned interface that serves people directly and gives agents a structured way to engage. We anticipated a steep rise in agents visiting and using websites, and saw them becoming a critical new customer type: representing people’s needs, evaluating what a business offers, and increasingly taking action on their behalf.
The recent wave of personal agents brings that future into much sharper focus. September’s introductions of OpenAI’s dots and Meta’s Muse, alongside products such as Instinct, give people more ways to delegate work across websites and services. These agents can pursue a task across several steps, using tools and acting within the permissions their customers give them.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch recently predicted that direct human browsing could “become a rounding error in coming years.” That is a forecast, but it captures the scale of the change businesses need to consider.
Consumer behavior is already moving in this direction. In a June 2026 survey across 11 markets, McKinsey found that 53% of consumers had used AI for shopping in the previous three months. Willingness to let AI complete purchases also exceeded actual use. For businesses, that gap points to a practical opportunity: give customers’ assistants a reliable way to move from a recommendation to a completed request.
We see this as the beginning of the inflection we’ve been building for. As more people delegate research, decisions and everyday tasks, businesses will increasingly encounter agents arriving with a job to complete. A web built around people navigating pages is becoming a web where software can engage with businesses on their behalf. That changes who businesses design for, how they serve customers, and what it means to have a presence online.
Opal takes the next step. The business becomes an active participant in the customer’s journey, able to contribute its expertise and offer a useful next action. Getting discovered is valuable. Being able to serve the customer who discovers you is what makes this a business channel.
An interface that represents your business
An agent interface gives an AI assistant a direct way to ask your business questions and use the capabilities you make available. To complete a customer’s request, an assistant needs access to what the business knows and can do, including current availability, the conditions that apply, and the steps required to carry out an action.
That includes the knowledge behind a recommendation, the rules governing an offer, and the connection required to complete a request. The business decides what it supports. The customer decides what their assistant is permitted to do on their behalf.
Consider a customer asking:
“Help me replace my dishwasher with a quieter model that fits my kitchen, and arrange delivery and installation next week.”
Imagine their assistant connecting to an appliance retailer through Opal. It could compare models using the retailer’s product knowledge, check dimensions and noise levels, and explain which options fit the customer’s needs. If the kitchen measurements or installation requirements are missing, it could ask before recommending a model.
Once the customer chooses a model, the assistant could check stock, delivery availability, and installation options. It could present the complete price, including installation and removal of the old appliance, then use the retailer’s supported checkout flow with the customer’s authorization. The retailer would confirm the order and arrangements, with any outstanding requirements made clear.
The retailer contributes much more than a product listing in this exchange. Its expertise helps the customer choose something that will work in their home, and its systems make the purchase and installation possible. The same knowledge and capabilities can serve a person asking directly or an assistant acting for them.
This opportunity extends well beyond retail. A supplier needs to gather the details for a quote. A service business needs to understand a problem and arrange a visit. A customer needs help changing a request they have already made. These are everyday interactions that businesses know how to handle, and that agents need a reliable way to access.
Trust matters when agents take action
As agents take on more of the customer journey, businesses need a reliable way to recognize who is making a request. An assistant arranging a purchase on a customer’s behalf should be distinguishable from unwanted automated traffic.
Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) helps businesses make that distinction. It uses signed requests to verify an agent’s identity and supports the exchange of customer-recognition and payment information. Businesses can recognize legitimate agent activity while retaining their own rules and protections. The customer’s permission still determines what the agent is allowed to do.
This is an important part of why we’re deepening our collaboration with Visa. Agent Score helps businesses understand their readiness for this new channel. With Opal, our work expands toward helping them participate: making their knowledge and capabilities accessible to agents, with the trust needed to support real interactions and transactions.
Opal gives a business a way to serve the agent. TAP helps it recognize the agent. Bringing those pieces together is part of making agent experience work in the real world.
Start with the website you already have
For businesses, the obvious question is how much work this takes.
Your website already gives customers ways to engage with your business. They can explore products, request a quote, book a service, or ask for help. You’ve already decided what those experiences need to do and how they fit your business.
With Opal, you start by entering your website URL. Opal identifies the information and functions your business already makes available online and helps make them easier for agents to understand and engage with.
The business stays in control of what agents can access and do. You can review the experience and decide which interactions to make available, while keeping your own policies and customer permissions at the center.
Over time, businesses will also be able to add their own capabilities, extending their agent experience as new customer needs emerge.
A channel the business can shape
Businesses know things that are difficult to capture in a generic product feed. They know which combinations work, when a service is unsuitable, and what questions a customer should ask before making a decision.
As more interactions move through AI, that expertise needs a direct route into the conversation. Otherwise, the business depends on somebody else’s interpretation of whatever information they happen to find.
We believe businesses need to own how they answer and act in this channel. This is agent experience: a new dimension of user experience, designed for the agents acting on customers’ behalf. It means deciding what knowledge to share, which capabilities to offer, and when human judgment is needed. It also means improving the experience as you learn how agents use it.
Different businesses will see different needs emerge. One may find agents asking detailed technical questions; another may see more service requests or appointment bookings. Understanding where agents succeed, where they get stuck, and what they need next gives businesses a practical way to improve this channel.
That’s why we’ve built Opal: to give businesses a direct way to serve agents and take ownership of this new customer channel.
Our ambition is for every business to have a direct relationship with customers in the AI channel, whether those customers arrive themselves or send an assistant. Opal is the next step in making that possible.
We’re onboarding businesses into our beta. To get on the list, enter your information on the Opal launch website. For questions, email opal@new-gen.ai.
