What did the buyer set up?

A facilities manager at a 60-person office in Zürich is tired of placing the same order every month. She instructs her procurement agent: reorder 20 reams of A4 paper and 6 kg of coffee beans on the first working day of each month, from the current supplier, as long as the total stays under CHF 400, and switch supplier only if the current one is out of stock.

This is a constructed worked example built to show the mechanics, and the office, the supplier and the figures are illustrative. The protocol steps follow the published specifications of MCP and AP2.

What is an intent mandate?

An intent mandate is a signed record of what a person has authorised an agent to buy, with its items, schedule and spending limit, which the agent presents to the supplier when the person is not there to approve. Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol on 16 September 2025 with more than 60 organisations, using cryptographically signed mandates to prove what a person approved (Google Cloud).

The mandate moves the approval from each order to the rule behind it, which is why it suits recurring business purchases. It does not replace the supplier’s own checks on account, credit and delivery address, and it proves approval only within the limits written into it. The agentic commerce glossary defines the related terms, and the comparison of UCP vs ACP vs AP2 shows where mandates sit next to checkout and tool protocols.

What happens on the first working day of the month?

The agent runs without the manager present, which is the case AP2 version 0.2 calls Human Not Present. In order:

  1. It calls the supplier’s MCP tool check_stock for both SKUs with the delivery postcode 8004, and gets back quantities and a delivery date.
  2. It calls create_cart and receives a cart with a total of CHF 362.40 including VAT.
  3. It presents the intent mandate the manager signed, which records the items, the monthly schedule and the CHF 400 limit.
  4. The supplier verifies that the signature is valid, that the cart falls inside the limits, and that the mandate has not been revoked, then accepts the order.
  5. The order confirmation and the invoice go to the manager’s inbox, and the agent records the order for next month’s comparison.

Where do suppliers usually fail this mission?

At step 4. Many suppliers can already expose stock and accept an order from an integration, but few can check a mandate. Without that check, a supplier either rejects orders from agents outright or accepts them without proof of approval, which leaves it exposed if the buyer disputes the charge. The first choice loses the recurring order to a competitor that can verify, and the second shifts risk onto the supplier.

The second failure is quieter. If stock is only visible after logging in to a customer portal, the agent cannot complete step 1 and switches supplier, as instructed, the first time it cannot confirm availability.

What does a supplier need to expose to win the recurring order?

Three pieces, each limited in scope: an MCP server exposing stock and cart creation for logged-in business accounts, AP2 mandate verification in front of order acceptance, and order events that land in analytics as agent orders rather than as unexplained direct traffic. Contract prices and delivery terms per account belong in the same server, since the agent compares the total it would pay, and the requirements for B2B suppliers and wholesalers list the price, stock and mandate fields behind it.

The gap is wide on the supplier side. Deloitte found that 38% of surveyed B2B buyers already use agentic AI in purchasing, while only 13% of suppliers have integrated their front and back office (reported by MarketScale, 11 September 2026). That survey is not specific to Switzerland, so read it as the direction of travel rather than a Swiss figure.

Autobasket Convert, our agentic checkout product, builds those three pieces for suppliers on Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce and custom stacks, starting with the one your buyers’ agents fail on first.