Your Next Customer May Be an AI Agent
Why this matters now Your next customer may be an AI agent. Google, PayPal, Mastercard, Cloudflare, and open protocol projects are building paths for software agents to discover offers, interpret terms, and move from recommendation into checkout. The near-term change is not science-fiction autonomy. It is a new commercial interface: products, prices, policies, entitlements, and fulfillment promises must be legible to machines as well as people. That interface changes two systems at once. The growth system must make an offer discoverable, comparable, and purchasable through an agent. The control system must prove what the human intended, what the agent was allowed to do, which merchant and terms were selected, whether money settled, and whether the right product or service was delivered. For regulated and physical-product companies, this is a strategic adjacency. The disciplines already used to connect requirements, authorization, configuration, traceability, and postmarket evidence can...