Trust and prosperity in agentic commerce: the tour operator as a digital guarantor
Artificial intelligence agents promise to search, negotiate, and book on our behalf. But history shows that no technology achieves widespread adoption until it is supported by an infrastructure of guarantees: this happened with e-commerce, and it is now happening with agentic commerce. The difference is that we are no longer delegating a simple search, but a decision – and this requires an unprecedented level of trust, made up of two components: human trust, rooted in brand and reputation, and technical trust, based on the security and traceability of agents. Applied to tourism – a sector with high emotional and economic stakes – this framework reveals a clear opportunity for tour operators: thanks to the experience they have built in the physical world, they already possess the assets needed to become the “trust brokers” of the digital age. The window of opportunity, however, is narrow.
