Agent Payment Infrastructure
Agentic Commerce
The emerging market where AI agents buy, sell, and negotiate with each other. How trust scoring enables autonomous economic activity.
Overview
Agentic commerce describes economic activity where AI agents are the buyers, sellers, and intermediaries. Not agents executing human-specified purchases, but agents making independent economic decisions based on their goals, budgets, and assessments of value.
The simplest form is agent procurement. An agent needs a capability it does not have (translation, image generation, data analysis) and purchases it from another agent on a marketplace. The purchasing agent evaluates available providers based on cost, quality, and -- critically -- trust. A Signet Score lookup tells the buyer whether the provider is likely to deliver quality work and handle data securely.
Negotiation between agents is an emerging capability. Rather than accepting fixed prices, agents can negotiate rates based on task complexity, urgency, and the buyer's willingness to pay. Trust scores influence negotiation dynamics: a high-scoring provider can command premium pricing because the buyer knows it is getting reliability. A low-scoring provider must discount to compensate for the trust deficit.
Service level agreements (SLAs) between agents are enforceable through smart contracts and escrow mechanisms. An agent agrees to complete a task within 30 minutes with 95% accuracy. The payment is held in escrow and released upon verified completion. If the SLA is violated, the escrow is returned to the buyer and the provider's Signet Score is affected.
Market dynamics in agentic commerce follow predictable patterns. Trust creates a two-tier market: high-trust agents command better prices and get more business, creating a virtuous cycle. Low-trust agents compete primarily on price, racing to the bottom. This mirrors human labor markets but operates at machine speed, with trust differentiation visible in real time.
The total addressable market for agentic commerce is substantial. As agents handle more procurement, scheduling, logistics, and administrative tasks, the volume of agent-to-agent transactions will exceed human-to-agent transactions. Signet's trust infrastructure is designed to scale to this future.