OpenAI made a big announcement yesterday about a new capability they are rolling out to allow buying within ChatGPT, called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). This comes on top of Google’s recent announcement of the Agent Payment Protocol (AP2). This is exactly what we have been forecasting in our work on the Year of AI at RunSignup.
This will take time to roll out, but sometime in the not too distant future, people using ChatGPT (and likely Claude, Gemini, etc.) will be able to signup for events within their chat sessions on RunSignup and TicketSignup. In addition, we are seeing this overlap with the increasing use of AI as a way to find events.
Finding Events with AI
The various AI systems have been scraping the list of events on RunSignup and TicketSignup for a while, much like Google. And like with Google search, RunSignup events rank high because of our reputation. ChatGPT now accounts for 1% of traffic to event websites, and growing quickly.
We have been waiting for the various AI vendors to allow for better registration of our MCP tools we have created to allow for event discovery. We have a long history of having a very good API that is used by literally dozens of event calendar listing services (like RunningintheUSA) that we have MCP tools to allow for easier discovery of events by the AI systems. These should come online in the coming months, helping to assure our customers their events will be listed in the new era of AI.
Along with the ACP (note how OpenAI is mimicking the MCP roll out), OpenAI has also released a Product Feed Spec. Today, this spec is more oriented to physical goods, but we expect this to mature, much like the Google spec we support for defining events to their system.
RunSignup is currently working on creating a generic interface that will allow us to rapidly deploy each AI vendors own specific implementation. Customers will actually see this new system first with a new Find a Race page on our website in the next month or so, along with a new and improved Event List capability that will allow our customers to easily put other events onto their RunSignup and TicketSignup event and organization websites.
Signing Up for Events with AI
Today ChatGPT offers links embedded with their search results. As you can see, RunSignup (and FindaRace) are the sources ChatGPT looks at and provides links to.
In the future with ACP (and AP2 from Google), we will be providing the information they currently crawl and scrape for in a more direct fashion. This will allow for a purchase within the AI Chat session. We expect this to behave increasingly like ApplePay where the user’s card information is held by OpenAI and secure tokens are used to process the transaction.
The ACP protocol provides minimal information about the purchaser (much like ApplePay) to RunSignup and TicketSignup. This means initial implementations will be more appropriate for TicketSignup type transactions. RunSignup race registration often requires extensive information like date of birth and gender and other custom questions. With the initial implementation of the spec, we will get the email and physical address from ACP so we can send confirmation emails and record the information in our database correctly and pay the appropriate sales tax.
We are in the position to be able to release this functionality within a week or two of being enabled by OpenAI. This may take a while since they are still very early on, and we know their launch partner Etsy is still asking for some additional functionality that we would want as well. Also, the current focus is on products. But there is a large opportunity for services like events and travel that will mean there is significant motivation for OpenAI and Google to support event transactions. We hope our 50%+ market share in endurance as well as our PCI Level 1 Payment Facilitator status will enable us to be an early adopter.
RunSignup and our AI Commitment
Our Year of AI is proving to be very exciting. And this is just the start of this new platform. Our mission is to leverage the power of AI for our event customers. We want to take care of the complexities of all of these specs and just make things work. Much like our Customer Service AI Chatbot for Events, we will make events easily discoverable on the new AI platforms, and easy to signup without our event customers needing to know or worry about all of the details.