Agents do what humans don't
An agent goes beyond a Gen AI tool with a search box. It doesn't just look for the hotel room there and then, it can keep looking for a week or a month and book when the price is right. Merchants have started to implement Machine Context Protocol (MCP and WebMCP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) so agents can navigate product pages and price lists. If product discovery on your site is hard for an agent, it will favour the sellers who make it easy. Talk to us if you'd like a view on where you stand.
Other protocols handle the trust: that a shopping agent is who it claims to be, that it carries the authority to buy, and that the money moves and arrives. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol has been carrying live European transactions since 2 July 2026 with more than thirty named issuers, and on 10 September 2026 Ant International, Visa and Mastercard agreed a Know Your Agent framework so their versions can work together.
One worry is worth putting down here. Most executives assume an agent buyer will grind their suppliers into the floor. MIT looked at 180,000 negotiations where both sides were agents and found that the ones told to create value closed more deals than the ones told to claim it. Qi Han Wong's comparison of Claude and Gemini found the polite, relationship-focused agent got better terms in fewer rounds than the transactional one. Tell your agent to squeeze and it does worse.
The part nobody has built yet
Which brings us to the gap. Finding the seller, proving who you are and paying the bill are all sorted. Agreeing the terms is not.
Four efforts are worth watching, and none of them is finished. MNP, the Market Negotiation Protocol, lets a buyer's agent and a seller's agent haggle over price and terms, and has been running on a test network since December 2025. A202, published by Plural Worlds on 8 August 2026, takes on the harder corporate version: who is allowed to agree what, what each side has to reveal, and what evidence is left at the end. MyTerms comes at it from the buyer's side, letting you put your own standard terms on the table for a seller to accept. ACP already negotiates, although only over the plumbing, such as which payment methods are supported, and never price. Alongside those, standards like Traveler.md and the Personal Context Protocol are working out where an agent keeps what it knows about you, which is what it needs in order to trade one thing off against another.
Forecasting the tornado
This is the part of our job we enjoy. Merchants spent 2026 getting ready for agents that turn up and pay the asking price. In 2027 they'll meet agents that turn up instructed to do better than that, and there's still nothing telling either side how that conversation runs, when it stops, or what record is left behind. We called the negotiation layer in February, six months before A202 existed. We're calling the rest of it now.
A workable standard has to answer a short list of questions.
- Which terms are open for discussion.
- How an offer and a counter get written down.
- What an agent can agree to on its own, and when it has to come back to a person.
- When the haggling stops, so neither side can keep going indefinitely.
- And what the deal record looks like afterwards, signed by both, so that refunds, disputes and your finance team all read the same document.
All of these designs have the two agents talking directly to each other. At Trusted Agents we think a middleman will often do better: it takes both sides' constraints and publishes only the settlement, so your agent can say what a Thursday delivery is worth without telling the retailer your ceiling.
What we'd do now
Write down what you're willing to concede, before an agent asks you for it. What can be given away, to whom, in what volume, and what has to come back to a person. Most companies have this in a sales director's head.
Take three of your discounts and decide which you'd grant on an agent's word and which need proof. The prize is real, because you police most entitlements after the fact today and a proved one can be granted up front, which is faster for your customer and cheaper for you. Done properly, a carer, a student or a disabled traveller proves what they're owed without having to explain why, and your market gets wider rather than narrower.
And point an agent at your own tail spend before somebody points one at you. BCG puts the saving from actively managing tail spend at 5 to 10 percent of annual spend, and Pactum has been running supplier negotiations at that scale for Walmart and others for years. It's the lowest-risk place to learn, and it pays for itself.
So, where in your business does a good deal not happen, only because nobody has the time to have the conversation?
