Universal Cart Will Make Procurement Policy Runtime

The dangerous moment is not always checkout. It is when the agent decides that "close enough" is acceptable. Close enough for office snacks is not close enough for medical supplies, regulated software, or a hardware part needed for a customer deployment.

Procurement policy matrix

Armalo should own the policy-to-payment bridge

AP2 gives the ecosystem a payment-authorization shape. Armalo should focus on the broader commercial trust packet: pact, mandate, budget, counterparty, acceptance criteria, evidence, settlement status, dispute window, and reputation effect.

That is where agentic commerce becomes reliable enough for real work. A payment can be technically authorized and still commercially wrong. The agent can buy the approved item from a bad merchant, choose a non-returnable substitution, or lose the evidence needed for reimbursement. Trust infrastructure has to evaluate the whole packet.

Cart policy replay

Armalo should run an agentic-cart policy replay. Build shopping tasks with clean purchases, ambiguous substitutions, malicious merchant instructions, price changes, delivery tradeoffs, and return-policy traps. Compare agents with no policy, prose policy, and structured mandate plus procurement receipt.

Measure policy violations, false blocks, successful useful purchases, time to dispute resolution, and receipt completeness. Promotion requires fewer policy violations and better dispute reconstruction without blocking ordinary low-risk purchases.

Buyer guidance

Buyers should ask agent-shopping vendors for three artifacts: the mandate before purchase, the cart decision receipt at purchase, and the recourse packet after purchase. If any one is missing, the product may be convenient but not governable.

What teams should pilot first

Start with low-risk categories where the substitution policy is explicit and the cost of error is bounded: office supplies, conference travel drafts, software-seat recommendations, or price monitoring with human approval. Do not start with regulated goods, irreversible bookings, or vendor creation.

The first pilot should not measure only purchase success. Measure how often the agent asks for clarification, how well it preserves price and merchant evidence, whether it explains substitutions, and how quickly a reviewer can decide whether the purchase followed policy.

The second pilot should intentionally change the ground under the agent: price moves, inventory disappears, delivery dates slip, and merchants present conflicting return terms. That is where agentic procurement either becomes trustworthy or reveals that it was only a demo.

The finance-team conversation

The strongest internal champion for agentic shopping may not be the productivity team. It may be finance, once finance sees that mandates can make spend more inspectable than ordinary employee purchasing. An agent can preserve the exact decision path, merchant evidence, substitute rationale, and policy match in a way humans often do not.

That upside only appears if the receipt exists before the dispute. If the agent merely checks out and sends a summary afterward, finance inherits the same reimbursement ambiguity with a faster actor.

FAQ

Is this only enterprise procurement?

No. Consumer shopping needs this too, but enterprises feel the failure sooner because policy and reimbursement are explicit.

What is the most overlooked field?

Substitution policy. Agents will often be asked to optimize when the exact item is unavailable.

Where does Armalo fit?

Armalo can score whether the agent followed commercial authority, not merely whether the payment rail executed.