For thirty years, being findable online meant being findable by people. You optimised for search. You bid on keywords. You made your product easy for a human to discover and buy. That era is ending. The next buyer is not a person. It is an agent acting on a person's behalf.
Most 'agentic commerce' is just advertising with a new audience
Most of the conversation about agentic commerce is really about marketing and advertising: making your listing legible to a bot instead of a human. That is the digital-services view of the world, where the transaction ends the moment money changes hands. It is a clean, closed loop. Click, pay, done.
Physical products do not work that way
A jacket is manufactured in one country, shipped through three, and sold in a fourth. Over its life it changes ownership three or four times: resold, refurbished, recycled. Dozens of stakeholders touch it along the way, and each one holds only a fragment of the truth about that object:
- The factory that made it.
- The brand that put its name on it.
- The retailer that sold it.
- The marketplace that resold it.
- The recycler that recovered it.
None of them holds all of it. That is the real system an agent has to operate in. The task is not simply 'find me a product.'
“Verify this physical thing is what the seller claims, trace where it has been, confirm who owns it now, and settle a transaction that respects everyone with a stake in it.”
No agent can do that today, because the truth about a physical product is severed from the product itself. It is scattered across private databases, paper certificates, and receipts thrown in the bin. The object moves through the world while the facts about it stay behind.
This is infrastructure, not advertising
This is a far more complex problem than agent-readable advertising. It is foundational infrastructure for how physical things move through the world. And it raises a question that matters well beyond technology.
Who should own this?
The right to own a physical thing, and to prove it is yours, is one of the oldest and most fundamental parts of human culture. A system that records the truth of what billions of people own cannot belong to a single company. That is where Part 2 begins.
James Albarracin is the Founder & CEO of Family Labs, the company behind the Universal Goods Protocol, open infrastructure that tokenises physical products into programmable digital assets via EU-compliant Digital Product Passports.