Business-to-Agent (B2A) is a commercial model in which businesses make their products, services and information discoverable, understandable and transactable by AI agents acting on behalf of people or organisations. In B2A, the party you serve is not a human browsing a website but software reasoning and acting on a person's behalf.
The short answer
B2A stands for Business-to-Agent. It describes how a business operates when its customer, or the party acting for its customer, is an autonomous AI agent such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. The agent discovers you, reads your information, compares you to alternatives against its user's constraints, and can complete an action or purchase, often without a human ever loading your page.
B2A is the business-side view of agentic commerce, the broader shift in which AI agents increasingly discover, evaluate, recommend, purchase and interact with products and services on behalf of users.
B2B, B2C, and now B2A
The abbreviation extends a familiar pattern. What changes is who the business is really serving.
B2B
Business to Business. A human buyer inside an organisation, reached through sales and relationships.
B2C
Business to Consumer. A human consumer who browses, is persuaded, and buys.
B2A
Business to Agent. An AI agent acting for a person or organisation, reading data and transacting through interfaces.
See the full breakdown in B2A vs B2B vs B2C.
The fundamental shift
The internet was built for people. The next layer is being built for agents. For thirty years, web pages optimised for human attention: layout, imagery, persuasion, and the click. An agent has none of that. It reads structured data and calls APIs. In B2A, the businesses that win are the ones a machine can read, trust and act on. Analysis
Related concepts
- Agentic commerce: commerce in which AI agents carry out shopping and buying tasks for users.
- Machine customers: Gartner's term for non-human economic actors. Gartner projects machine customers will influence or participate in around $30 trillion of purchases by 2030. Gartner Fact
- Agent-ready business: one whose data, interfaces and policies are legible and usable by agents.
- Agent discovery: how agents find and shortlist businesses that fit a task.
Does B2A mean anything else?
Historically, “B2A” has also stood for Business-to-Administration (companies transacting with government). In the context of AI and commerce it now overwhelmingly means Business-to-Agent, which is the sense used throughout this site.
Make your business agent-ready
You know what B2A is. Here is how to prepare for it.