Shipper’s Deputy model implies a social mechanism for agent adoption: trust is first earned by the agent through daily performance with its operator, then transfers socially to colleagues through the operator’s credibility. When colleagues see that your agent handles tasks reliably, they start depending on it — inheriting trust from you. This mirrors how B2B becomes B2A — agents become the buyer works at the organizational level, but at the interpersonal level.
This has implications for SaaS survives as the governance and coordination layer — determinism still rules — if agent trust flows through human relationships, governance systems need to track not just what agents do but who operates them. It also connects to Persistent agent memory preserves institutional knowledge that walks out the door with employees because the trust chain depends on the agent having a consistent track record, which requires persistent memory of past performance.