Agents-Powered B2B Marketplaces
Opportunities for AI agents in a marketplace context
One of the concerns we’ve heard multiple times about B2B marketplaces is that they are tech-enabled service businesses (or digital traders) rather than software businesses. The line between these two archetypes of business models is somewhat blurry, but the argument usually revolves around 4 points:
- Sales: Salespeople employed at a B2B marketplace do not only work on acquiring new clients, be they buyers or sellers. They are needed to handle transactions between existing buyers and sellers and, as such, impact B2B marketplaces’ gross margins.
- Support: Human support is required for ongoing transactions and needs to scale with the number of transactions. This also impacts B2B marketplaces’ gross margin.
- Buyer/seller insurance: Claims between dissatisfied buyers and sellers also require human support and must be handled by the employees of B2B marketplaces, which are very often merchants of records (i.e., part of the transaction).
- Finance: digitizing money flows in a B2B context is often more complex than plugging a payment API and, therefore, involves managing large transaction values, working capital, AR, and AP workflows. All of these can be people-intensive and difficult to scale.
Every marketplace is different. Depending on the nature of buyers, sellers, and transaction flows, some of the processes above can be more or less difficult to automate with traditional software.
Now, as we’re all spending time with companies building AI agents, we also noticed that each of the items above: sales, support, insurance/claim management, and finance workflows are prime examples of processes that AI agents have a chance to automate in a not-so-distant future. We’ve seen many examples lately of sales, support, claim management, and finance-focused AI agent businesses; what if they were implemented in a B2B marketplace context?
The argument is also that B2B marketplaces (or B2B tech-enabled services) are in a great spot to launch these agents because they have the data, the customer relationships, and they are software-first organizations compared to their traditional competitors.
About a year ago, we wrote about AI-first service businesses here. We’re increasingly curious about what such an AI-first approach could look like in a B2B marketplace context. These agents could finally provide an elegant answer to the scalability (or gross margin) challenge that many marketplaces face. In a world where the defensibility of traditional software businesses is being questioned, these B2B marketplaces often play in vertical markets with much less competition but sometimes display strong potential for network effects.
At a more macro level, we remain convinced that there are still many industries where trading flows between industry players will be digitized over the next few years. This digitization process could happen in a centralized fashion through new B2B marketplaces or more decentralized by deploying software (and agents) in traditional players.
We’re excited to explore these opportunities with our existing portfolio companies and are looking for new ones to add. If you’re building or working on that, please write us here. We’d love to chat!
