Making sense of agentic commerce and AI assurance for business leaders.
AI is starting to transact, decide, and act on behalf of buyers and businesses
AI agents are starting to shop, evaluate, and transact on behalf of buyers. Companies are starting to deploy them inside commercial workflows. Underneath all of this, a new layer of infrastructure is forming: agent identity, network-level trust, AI assurance frameworks, AI risk underwriting, and the audit and governance scaffolding that lets any of it work safely at scale.
The commercial implications are large. The trust, identity, and assurance implications are larger. Companies that understand both layers early will have a meaningful advantage. Those that do not will find themselves making decisions about agent commerce, AI risk, and AI assurance reactively, after the standards have already been written by someone else.
What Andrew writes about
Agentic Commerce
Trust, Identity, AI Risk and AI Assurance
Commercial and Technical Readiness
Who Andrew writes for
Andrew writes for business leaders working across three audience segments. Commercial, growth, and digital leaders inside B2B SaaS, B2B commerce, payments, and identity-adjacent categories. Risk underwriters and insurance specialists working on AI exposure, AI cover, and emerging AI risk products. AI assurance, audit, and governance professionals inside advisory practices, specialist AI assurance firms, and internal assurance teams.
If you are responsible for how your company is found, evaluated, transacted with, audited, insured, or held accountable as AI takes on more commercial work, this is what Andrew thinks about every week.
Why Andrew
Andrew McPherson writes and analyses agentic commerce and AI assurance. He publishes "This Week in Agentic Commerce" on LinkedIn each Saturday, and a fortnightly long-form essay at newsletter.andymcpherson.com.
He is a director of CiteCompass and previously served as CIO at SkyCity Entertainment Group and CTO at Stuff, where he led enterprise-wide digital transformation, technology strategy, and the implementation of generative AI across 50 media properties. The combination of senior operating experience and the current writing and analysis work shapes how Andrew thinks about agentic commerce, AI trust and identity, AI risk, and AI assurance: as commercial questions first, technical and governance questions second.
Featured writing
What Agentic Commerce Means in Plain English
Agentic commerce explained for business leaders: what it is, what it is not, and a five-stage maturity model for understanding where your market sits.
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