Purchasing Agents

Truebill is an example of a personal agent, authorized to charge your credit card. The value proposition here is that Truebill can lower your bills by negotiating on your behalf. Truebill leverages the collective power of thousands of consumers, and has an effective business model and technology to make these transactions with vendors -- something consumers can't do for themselves.

Q. How does a consumer go about choosing which agent service to use?
A. By reading consumer reviews.

This article, Truebill Review: 4 Things to Know Before Signing Up, written by Nick Cole, provides much more information about the company, its processes, and reported outcomes than a Yelp-style review.
Nick also consults with the Better Business Bureau to find out how many complaints have been reported against the vendor.
(Businesses also use "ratings services" like RiskRecon, Osano, BuiltWith, to help vet their own third-party vendors.)

Another reason why consumers need a personal agent (service) like Truebill, is for managing subscriptions. If you ever signed up for a free trial but were charged anyway, you can let your purchasing agent handle it.
You would do that by giving Truebill permission to monitor (anytime read access) your credit card statements and checking accounts.

This authorized activity, is similar to giving Privacy Agents permission to monitor (anytime read access) your email Inbox. One of the Privacy Agents I evaluated, also wanted permission to send privacy access requests directly from my email account. Truebill -- if authorized -- could also send payments from your checking account to pay the credit cards Truebill uses to manage subscriptions, and to pay itself.

I'm very bullish on consumers' use of authorized agents. Truebill is an example of a purchasing agent. Mine is an example of a Privacy Agent. Ratings services, are in effect, agents by proxy.
But authorized agents aren't new; for decades, agents have been representing celebrities, artists, and athletes.

So, while I'm bullish on authorized agents, the downside is that now we need an agent to manage our agents. That's why I'm advocating for a Zero-Trust Agent Architecture. We need the agents that we don't trust.