Twenty-three pages on trust, delegation and context — the framework for agentic commerce, written with Visa.
If you found yourself nodding along, you already know the hard part isn't understanding the shift. It's being the person inside your organisation who turns it into a move before everyone else is ready.
Visa and Trusted Agents co-authored the paper. The work on this page is Trusted Agents' own — independent, with nothing to sell you but clarity.
Plenty of firms will publish a point of view on agentic commerce. Visa chose two people to help define the agentic framework with them — because the triangle at the centre of that paper isn't a model we observed from the outside. It's work we built.
Years on delegation, identity and proof — how a person grants authority to an agent without surrendering control. Two of the triangle's three legs: Trust and Delegation.
Jamie on LinkedIn
Built the semantic layer that gives an agent the context to act accurately on a real person's behalf — recognised by Gartner as a Cool Vendor. The third leg: Context.
Gam on LinkedIn
Most people are describing this shift from the outside. We helped write it down.
When a customer's agent arrives at your door, can you tell it from hostile automation — and does your business even register that it arrived?
Where are you about to let agents act on your customers' behalf — and who has decided what each one may do, within what limits, for how long?
What does your business actually look like to an agent right now — and is that the version of you you'd choose?
On vocabularyDelegation is the authority a customer hands an agent — what it may do, within what limits, for how long. We call it delegation; in Visa's framework you'll meet it as a mandate: the cryptographically signed, auditable artifact — issued via protocols like AP2 — that proves the delegation took place. Delegation is the act; the mandate is the proof. Same idea, two labels.
Most leadership teams can't answer it directly. The ones that can will set the terms for the rest of their sector.
There's a specific, uncomfortable moment the leaders we work with describe in almost identical terms.
You have the clarity. What you don't yet have is shared language, an agreed point of view, a remit, or a budget. The challenge now is to align everyone who hasn't seen it.
You're not blocked by a failed pilot. You're earlier than that... probably trying to create the conditions for good decisions, before anyone is ready to make them. That means moving sceptical executives, distracted peers and teams waiting for direction — all without the authority of a signed-off programme.
It's the hardest part. And it's the part most firms skip straight past, so they can sell you the build.
It's exactly the stage we're built for.
Sells the build, so everything looks like a build — agentic tools stood up on human-era processes and bad data. They start exactly where the paper warns you not to. We finish before they begin.
Has a model to sell, so the answer is always their model. Useful later. Never neutral now.
Scopes the largest engagement it can and makes its own brand the hero of the deck. You wanted to be the one equipped to lead — not the one who hired the consultants.
We have no platform to defend, no licences to renew, no implementation to protect. Our only incentive is getting your framing right before you commit to anything you'd regret — and the work makes you the credible one in the room, not us.
Four ways in. Each ends with something you can use — a deliverable you produce, a position you can defend, a plan you can run. Most leaders start at the top.
We take When AI agents act and make it yours: your customers, your exposure, your competitive position. The fastest way to brief your own leadership on what's coming, in their language, without the hype.
Reframe the market trajectory, the business risks and the competitive implications for your sector — grounded, fast, no vendor agenda.
Turn understanding into a shared position your organisation can actually align behind — and a direction you can take to the board.
Operationalise the strategy into buildable components — the bridge from vision to a production-ready prototype.
We wrote this page for one person.
Not the organisation.
You.
The innovator, transformation lead, product, CX or digital leader who's trying to make sense of it before anyone else in the building has the language for it. Intellectually ahead of the room. Personally on the hook. Surrounded by people who are either dismissive or frozen.
If you recognised yourself there, the recognition wasn't an accident. It's who we're genuinely useful to — and we'd rather be honest about that than pretend we're for everyone.
We started writing about this a decade ago and founded Trusted Agents in 2025 on a single prediction: the moment the trust infrastructure was strong enough to carry a complete agent-to-agent transaction, agentic commerce would accelerate fast — because the demand was already there, and only the infrastructure was missing. That infrastructure is going into production now.
Our clients include
We won't grow an army of vanilla consultants and call it the same thing. The work is valuable because we do it directly — which means our capacity is finite, and we're getting booked.
If the shift is landing close to home, the right time to reach out is before you have everything figured out. That's the stage we're for.
