David leads agent research and design at Orchard28. Before founding the company he spent 35 years building marketplace and payments systems, and he has strong opinions about who should hold the wallet in an agentic world (hint: not the agent). He writes about autonomous transactions, trust engineering, and what it takes to let software buy things on your behalf.
Uber settled the question of who signs the receipt a decade ago. Agentic commerce inherits the same answer — and the lift to make it work today is smaller than it looks.
When software spends money while you sleep, promises aren’t enough. Independent certification is how every party in an agentic transaction knows it’s safe — and Orchard28 holds that bar today.
Corporate travel is the most rule-bound purchase in business — which makes it the perfect job for an agent. Policy-faithful bookings, one PIN tap on the corporate card, and about $53 saved every time a human doesn’t have to do it.
Agent-ready credentials are real progress — but when an autonomous agent checks out and the cardholder disputes it, someone still eats the chargeback. Here’s why that someone is too often the merchant, and how Orchard28 rebalances the scale.
AP2’s mandate machinery grew up in the world of recurring subscriptions and merchant-initiated charges. Stretch it over autonomous one-shot purchases and the seams show — in the merchant’s chargeback column.
The goods are gone, the money is clawed back, the fee lands anyway — and now you have three weeks to prove your innocence. A look at the human cost of chargebacks, and the better way agentic commerce can treat sellers.
A play-by-play of an autonomous ticket run — what the agent watches, when it strikes, and why the human never had to wake up.
How Orchard28 lets an agent spend real money without a human tap — and why the answer is hard limits, not good intentions.
Uber turned getting a ride into a dispatch. The same shift is coming for buying — and it changes what a transaction even is.