Agent trust transfers from human credibility — colleagues adopt agents operated by people they trust

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. This social transfer presupposes trust was first earned from the initial buyer — The first enterprise-AI sale is a trust sale — buyers judge de-risking, not capability — since an operator can only vouch for an agent that already cleared the de-risking bar.