We just taught AI agents to complete real purchases (blog.arcade.dev)

Researchers and developers have demonstrated a practical leap in “agentic commerce”: AI agents that can securely authenticate into real business systems and complete purchases or back‑office tasks on behalf of users. Tradestack, building an agentic back office for UK contractors (invoicing, estimates, etc.), used Arcade’s authorization and tool‑management capabilities to overcome the common “authentication wall” that stops many agent projects from reaching production. The team’s work shows agents can do more than chat—they can call LLM‑consumable tools, access protected systems reliably, and execute transaction flows end‑to‑end. Why this matters: authentication and multi‑user authorization are the primary blockers for deploying agentic systems at scale, and roughly 70% of AI projects stall here. By expanding tool management and user authorization (and launching a second pricing plan to lower barriers), the platform aims to let developers onboard many end users into agents—something MCP Servers currently don’t support. The result is a practical path to production for commerce automation, with immediate implications for SaaS integrations, secure tokenized access patterns, and operational workflows—and a reminder that production readiness now demands robust auth, auditing, and risk controls as much as better LLM prompts.