Every week another company announces an AI agent that can negotiate contracts, manage a portfolio, run a supplier relationship, or operate a customer service function end-to-end. The demos are impressive. The deployments are not.

The gap isn’t capability. The models are good enough. The gap is that an agent, no matter how sophisticated, cannot yet participate in commerce as a real economic actor. It can read a contract better than most lawyers. It cannot sign one. It can manage a treasury. It cannot own one. It can run your marketing, your procurement, and your customer support, but you won’t hand it the corporate bank account. There’s no way to scope what it can touch, no audit trail if something goes wrong, and no kill switch that actually works in real time. So the most capable employee at every fast-growing company is locked out of the most leveraged tool.

This is the actual bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption, and it runs deeper than most discussions acknowledge.

Making an agent genuinely autonomous requires solving three distinct planes of infrastructure simultaneously. The first is trust: does the counterparty know who this agent is, what it’s authorized to do, and what its track record looks like? The second is market: can the agent discover work, quote a price, sign a contract, settle payment, and resolve a dispute without human intervention? The third is control: can the organization deploying the agent prove, to a regulator or a board, exactly what the agent was authorized to do and what it actually did?

None of these planes exists in mature form today.

On the trust side, the identity problem alone is unsolved. Existing card frameworks like EMV, 3-D Secure and chargeback rules assume a human clicked a button. KYC verifies a face and an ID, not the autonomous code now acting on a person’s behalf. Once an agent executes a payment, the liability question becomes unresolved: is it the issuer, the merchant, or the model? t54 is one of the more interesting attempts to answer this, building what they call a Know Your Agent layer, binding human identity to agent identity and producing cryptographic proof of intent that financial institutions can actually consume.

On the market side, even getting an agent access to a payment account is harder than it sounds. The obvious solution is to give it access to the company bank account. The obvious problem is that one bad decision wipes the treasury.