The Argument
In traditional B2B2C commerce, a brand sells through a platform intermediary to reach a consumer. That model assumed human buyers navigating human-designed interfaces. When every party in the chain deploys its own agent - a brand agent, a platform agent, and a consumer agent - the intermediation problem becomes a design problem. Trust must propagate across three or more parties. Delegation must cascade through multiple agent boundaries. Liability must be allocated across entities that never directly interact. The essay examines how B2B2C agentic commerce restructures the value chain and what it demands of Agentic Experience Design.
The Evidence
The essay identifies three structural challenges that emerge when B2B2C chains become agentic. First, trust propagation - a consumer's trust in their agent does not automatically extend to the platform agent or the brand agent. Trust must be established, verified, and maintained at every boundary in the chain. Second, delegation cascades - when a consumer delegates to their agent, and that agent delegates to a platform agent, authority boundaries become ambiguous. The essay maps these cascades against the AXD Delegation Design framework. Third, the platform power problem - platforms that control the intermediation layer gain disproportionate leverage over both brands and consumers in the agentic economy.
The analysis draws on the emerging protocol landscape - ACP, UCP, and MCP - to show how multi-party agent chains require protocol-level trust infrastructure that does not yet exist in most implementations. The disintermediation thesis is examined: whether consumer agents will bypass platforms entirely, and what that means for the current value chain architecture.
The Implication
Organisations operating in B2B2C models must design for multi-party trust propagation now, before the agent chains become operational at scale. The intermediation problem is not a future concern - it is the structural reality of any commerce model where brands, platforms, and consumers each deploy autonomous agents. Those who design the trust architecture for multi-party agent chains will control the value chain. Those who do not will find themselves intermediated by those who do.