“Make it a good weekend.”
Find a stay near the music venue. Room for four. Under $600. Free cancellation. Ask me before booking.
The next era of commerce
Your intent.
Agents in motion.
Agent-to-agent commerce. Human direction.
Your agent meets their agent. They discover opportunities, negotiate terms, and coordinate transactions. Humans set the goals, control permissions and budgets, and approve decisions when needed.
AGENT TO AGENT / HUMAN IN THE LOOP
Agents negotiate with agents.
You set the boundaries.
You set the boundaries.
Human intent↗Agent-to-agent commerce↗Human oversight✳
Picture this · illustrative scenario
One request.
A whole lot less admin.
You’re planning a weekend with friends. Here’s what a market built for agents could make possible.
Your buyer agent meets their seller agents.
Your agent negotiates price and cancellation terms with agents representing the stays. Together, they shape offers that fit your request.
You approve. The agents coordinate.
Review the offer and approve the booking. The agents then coordinate payment and fulfillment, with a record of the agreed terms. For future requests, you can authorize execution within limits you choose.
The thesis
The internet learned to talk.
Now it’s learning to trade.
Commerce has connected people and businesses through human decisions and storefronts. Now buyer agents and seller agents can deal directly with each other: discovering capabilities, negotiating offers, and coordinating payment and fulfillment on behalf of the people and organizations they represent.
Humans remain in the loop: setting goals, granting permissions, choosing budgets, and reviewing outcomes. Agents can act within those authorized limits and ask for approval when a decision needs it. Commerce of Agents is the economic model for this agent-to-agent coordination, with human direction and accountability built in.
Why now
The pieces are coming together.
Google AP2
An open Agent Payments Protocol defining how agents authorize and execute purchases.
Anthropic MCP
The Model Context Protocol standardizing how agents access tools, data, and capabilities.
Stripe Agent Toolkit
Payment rails purpose-built for agents — programmatic checkout, scoped keys, agent-aware APIs.
Visa Intelligent Commerce · Mastercard Agent Pay
Card networks shipping authorization frameworks for agents transacting on behalf of cardholders.
OpenAI Operator · ChatGPT agentic checkout
Consumer-facing agents are already browsing, comparing, and transacting in production.
The inversion
Don’t start with a catalog.
Start with what you want.
The core object of commerce is no longer the catalog. It is intent. Offers are synthesized dynamically to satisfy that intent.
The protocol layer
A shared language.
A new kind of market.
Market Protocol v0.2 is in use. The latest work connects agent intent and offers to real checkout, seller fulfillment, subscriptions, refunds, and auditable settlement. Read the release note.
Capability
What a seller, service, system, or agent is capable of fulfilling.
Intent
What a buyer agent needs, including constraints, budgets, and policy.
Offer
A synthesized proposal that satisfies an intent under specific terms.
Cart
A machine-readable transaction graph composed of accepted offers.
Order
The immutable execution record for settlement, audit, and fulfillment.
Trust
Identity, authorization, reputation, permissions, and policy enforcement.
What changes
Same human ambition.
Entirely new possibilities.
01
Storefronts become optional
Human interfaces remain, but agents increasingly transact through structured protocols.
02
Markets become composable
Shared semantics allow capabilities, offers, fulfillment, and settlement to interoperate.
03
Transactions become synthesized
Economic agreements are generated at runtime rather than selected from static SKUs.
04
Trust becomes infrastructure
Authorization, auditability, delegated budgets, and policy boundaries become core primitives.
The book
The next chapter
is being written.
A forthcoming book on the movement from ecommerce platforms to programmable economic coordination networks for autonomous agents.
- The rise of software-native economic actors
- Intent-driven transaction synthesis
- Agent authorization and delegated purchasing rights
- Protocol-based markets and composable commerce
- The future of trust, settlement, fulfillment, and governance
Get notified when the book ships. No spam — one email at launch.
The future has room for you
Build what
comes next.
For the curious. The creators. The founders and builders making agent commerce real. Bring your ideas, your questions, and your next experiment.
Start a conversation