Why Agentic Commerce Needs Contracts (Nitin Badjatia)

About this episode

When your AI agents start transacting on your behalf, who’s protecting your interests — and how do they prove it?

In this episode, host Andreas Welsch sits down with Nitin Badjatia, enterprise software veteran and board member of Customer Commons, to explore one of the most consequential and least-discussed gaps in agentic AI adoption: the absence of enforceable, machine-readable contracts between autonomous agents and the commercial web. Together, they unpack why the digital commerce infrastructure we’ve built on surveillance and click-through consent is fundamentally incompatible with a world where agents act, negotiate, and commit on our behalf — and what the emerging IEEE 7012 “My Terms” standard proposes to do about it.

Discover the strategic and governance foundations that responsible agentic commerce requires:

• Recognize that consent is not a contract — and build your agentic governance accordingly. The terms of service paradigm grants vendors expansive rights users never meaningfully agreed to. As agents multiply, that exposure compounds. IEEE 7012 proposes human-readable, machine-executable contract templates as the foundation for agent-to-agent and agent-to-vendor interaction.
• Model your digital interactions on physical-world norms. You wouldn’t share your financial strategy with an uncredentialed stranger, and you wouldn’t accept lifetime tracking as the price of entry at a grocery store. Yet that’s the standard your agents are operating within today. Bridging that gap is both an ethical imperative and a governance requirement.
• Understand the five contract tiers the My Terms standard introduces — from simple transactional exchanges (no data retained beyond the transaction) to more complex arrangements — and identify which tier is appropriate for each agent interaction in your commercial stack.
• Build toward a neutral, nonprofit contract infrastructure, analogous to how Creative Commons standardized licensing for creative works. The goal is a library of pre-negotiated, legally coherent templates that agents can carry into transactions — giving both parties a verifiable, auditable “legal receipt” for what was agreed.
• Treat data quality as a governance outcome. A surveilled customer shares guarded context; a customer operating under a mutual contractual arrangement shares richer, more accurate data willingly. Organizations that adopt contract-first agentic models early will generate a higher-fidelity customer signal — not just reduced legal exposure.

Whether you’re a Chief Digital Officer designing your agentic commerce strategy, a privacy or legal leader trying to get ahead of regulatory exposure, or an AI architect determining what rights your deployed agents should carry, this episode reframes the agentic opportunity through the lens that matters most: who is actually accountable when the agent acts?

Tune in now to understand why the infrastructure of trust — not the sophistication of the model — will determine which organizations can scale agentic commerce with confidence.

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Disclaimer: Views are the participants’ own and do not represent those of any participant’s past, present, or future employers. Participation in this event is independent of any potential business relationship (past, present, or future) between the participants or between their employers.

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