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Services Aren’t Products. Stop Pretending Agentic Commerce Works the Same.
I just got off the phone with a homeowner whose house flooded at 1:47 a.m. She was crying. Her adjuster was ghosting her. The city permit office opened at 8 a.m. and she had no idea what forms she needed. This isn’t a “add to cart” situation. This is real life, and every single UCP whitepaper I’ve read lately sounds like it was written by someone who’s never once quoted a water mitigation job in their life.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth the agentic commerce crowd refuses to say out loud: most high-value services don’t fit in your neat little autonomous agent world. Not even close.
The 14 Human Touches Problem
A typical fire restoration job in the $20k-$40k range touches at least 14 distinct humans before money changes hands. I’ve counted. Insurance adjuster, independent adjuster, contractor estimator, project manager, contents specialist, drying tech, reconstruction crew lead, city inspector, HVAC tech, electrician, plumber, cleaning crew supervisor, billing coordinator, and the homeowner who’s having the worst week of their life.
Each one of those people has veto power. Each one can kill the deal or slow it down by weeks. An AI agent can’t negotiate with an insurance adjuster who’s trying to lowball the job. It can’t show up at 2 a.m. when the homeowner discovers black mold in the crawlspace and has a full meltdown.
I’ve run a restoration contractor network for years. These jobs aren’t transactions. They’re relationships under extreme stress. The homeowner isn’t buying a “restoration outcome.” They’re buying someone who will answer their call when their house smells like smoke and their kids can’t stop coughing.
Why “Agentic Commerce” Falls Apart on Real Services
The UCP crowd keeps talking about autonomous agents negotiating and executing complex commerce. Cool story. Try getting an autonomous agent to do these things:
Read between the lines when a homeowner says “it’s not that bad” but their voice is shaking.
Navigate local permitting hell where every township has different rules that aren’t written down anywhere.
Manage scope creep when the insurance company suddenly decides the HVAC system “wasn’t damaged by the fire” even though it tested positive for smoke particulates.
Hold someone’s hand through the reality that their grandmother’s photo albums are gone forever.
These aren’t edge cases. This is the actual job.
I’ve watched too many tech bros try to productize services that fundamentally aren’t products. They build beautiful dashboards and talk about “frictionless experiences” while real operators are still exchanging emails with insurance adjusters who still use AOL addresses. The gap isn’t getting smaller. It’s getting clearer.
The Dangerous Fantasy
The dangerous part isn’t that these UCP think pieces exist. It’s that founders are starting to believe them. They’re building platforms assuming services can be slotted into the same commerce rails as physical products. Then they wonder why adoption is zero among anyone who’s actually done the work.
Services have context. Services have emotion. Services have massive information asymmetry and trust problems that can’t be solved with better APIs. A $27,000 restoration job isn’t a product with attributes. It’s a problem wrapped in human drama, regulatory constraints, and insurance bureaucracy.
That doesn’t mean technology can’t help. It absolutely can. But the solution isn’t pretending these services work like products. The solution is building tools that respect the fundamental differences instead of trying to hammer square services into round product holes.
Will’s Take: Stop trying to make services into products. The agentic commerce revolution sounds great until you’re standing in a burned-out kitchen at 3 a.m. trying to explain to a terrified homeowner why the “autonomous agent” can’t get their insurance company to approve temporary housing. Some things still need humans who know what the hell they’re doing. Act like it.
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