# Your buyers are starting to send their agents. Start here. > What Business-to-Agent covers and how to read it: definitions, guides with prices verified on a date, and news that changes what you owe a software buyer. - Publication: Business-to-Agent (https://business-to-agent.ai/) - Canonical: https://business-to-agent.ai/articles/start-here-your-buyers-are-sending-their-agents/ - Published: 2026-09-19 - Contributor: Priya Natarajan - Topic: About this publication *Who this is for:* product and commercial leads at software and data companies who have started hearing "can your product work with my assistant?" and don't yet have a good answer. Somewhere in your funnel this quarter, a buyer didn't read your pricing page. Their assistant did. It compared you with two competitors, tried to start a trial, hit the "Talk to sales" form, and reported back that you "require a sales call". The person bought from whoever's page their assistant could actually finish on. You'll never see that visit in your analytics, because it never became a lead. This site is about that moment and every other one like it: what a company owes a buyer that is software acting for a person, and what changes at each step of the sale when the party reading, deciding, and paying isn't a person. We call the category business-to-agent, and we try to define it in ordinary commercial situations rather than in slogans. ## What changed, and why it's your problem now Assistants have moved from recommending to buying. In June, Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, a service for agents to pay programmatically across its network, with Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase, and Cloudflare among the partners. On 10 September, Ant International, Mastercard and Visa began a shared Know-Your-Agent framework so that an agent registered with one network can be recognised by the others. Their joint projection is that agents will orchestrate three to five trillion dollars of consumer commerce by 2030. Whatever the real number turns out to be, the rails are being built now, by the companies that own the existing ones. None of that changes what you sell. It changes who arrives at your door and what they can do when they get there. An agent can read a price, compare it, pay it, and come back next month. It can't fill in a form that wants a phone number and a job title, wait three days for approval, or sit through an onboarding call. Every step of your customer journey that quietly assumes a person is a step where the agent stops and hands back to its owner, and the owner usually buys elsewhere. ## What you'll find here Three kinds of piece, each with a different job. - **Definitions.** One term at a time, from a buying moment you recognise, with its practical boundaries. What onboarding means when the buyer is software. What appraisal means when a recommendation needs evidence behind it. These carry the category, and they never pitch a vendor. - **Guides.** One vendor, one real task, walked end to end, with every price and rule read live from the vendor's own machine-readable storefront on a stated date. A guide always says what the product is, what it costs, why the agent-facing path is easier for an assistant than the human one, and what we could not verify. - **Dispatches.** News that changes what you owe a software buyer, with a dateline and the primary source linked. We don't cover launches for their own sake. We cover the ones that move a decision on your side. ## How a piece here is built Every article opens with who it's for and the situation they're in, gives the answer within the first few paragraphs, then walks one concrete example. Facts an assistant might lift sit in one labelled block: prices, limits, endpoints, the date we checked them. A caveats section says what the piece can't tell you. If a number is a model rather than a measurement, the sentence says so. Two things we won't do. We won't present a forecast as a definition; when a paragraph is a guess about where this goes, it's labelled as one. And we won't invent a customer, a conversation, or a result. If we haven't run something, we say we haven't. ## Who's writing I'm Priya Natarajan. I spent a decade building pricing pages, checkout flows, and onboarding for software companies, which is a polite way of saying I built a lot of the forms that stop agents today. Guides carry my name when they involve a judgement call, which they usually do. Definitions are sometimes unsigned; the category doesn't need a personality. ## Three pieces to read first If you're deciding whether to let agents buy at all, start with [the definition of an agent-facing customer journey](/articles/onboarding-without-a-form-when-the-customer-is-an-ai-agent/) and its seven steps, and find the first one your process can't complete without a person. If you already know which step it is, [the guides show](/articles/want-your-assistant-to-get-errands-done-try-actionlayer/) what a working version looks like at one vendor. If you're being asked by leadership what the card networks' announcements mean for you, [the dispatches are the short answer](/articles/the-card-networks-just-agreed-how-to-recognise-your-buyers-agent/). ## Questions people ask ### Is this for consumer companies or B2B? Both, but the examples lean B2B, because that's where the forms are longest and the sales cycles most human. The same seven steps apply to a shopping assistant buying a vacuum. ### Do I need to understand crypto wallets to follow the guides? No. Where a vendor's storefront takes wallet payments, the guide says so in plain words and notes the card option where one exists. We define every payment term the first time it appears. ### Do you take money from the vendors you write about? No vendor pays for a guide, and no guide recommends a vendor. A guide documents one path and its price on a stated date so you can judge it yourself. ## Sources - [Ant International, Mastercard and Visa initiate collaboration on Know-Your-Agent interoperability](https://www.ant-intl.com/en/news/detail/?id=ant-international-mastercard-and-visa-initiate-collaboration-on-know-your-agent-interoperability-to-scale-agentic-commerce), Ant International, 10 September 2026. - [Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines](https://investor.mastercard.com/investor-news/investor-news-details/2026/Mastercard-Launches-Agent-Pay-for-Machines-to-Unlock-Super-Fast-Always-On-Payments/default.aspx), Mastercard investor news, 10 June 2026.