Ep. 112 - Can Agents Do Business? How Blue Language Labs is Making Trust Programmable in the Agentic Economy

Zor Gorelov (0:00)

We are creating a system of coordination and trust. Our message to the world is, don't trust your agent, trust your system. Agents can search, agents can recommend, make a payment, they can act. But acting is not doing real business. Doing business is more than that. It's about offers, it's about orders, agreements, payment and settlements. Human approvals are critical. Humans in the loop is a problem. I think this model simply does not scale. If we ask humans to oversee a reaction that agents take, there is no agenic economy. Agents create opportunity for small businesses to build those kinds of relationships on the fly with agents that they trust, that they control to generate revenue and grow. With transaction costs going down to zero, there is real opportunity for agents to do business in ways that was not imagined before.

Sarah Stapp (0:55)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed. I'm Sarah Stapp, joined by my co-host Kara Parkey.

Kara Parkey (0:59)

And today we are joined by Zor Gorelov, the CEO of Blue Language Labs. And we are asking the defining question of the agentic era.

Can AI agents actually do business?

Sarah Stapp (1:10)

Zor, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Before we jump in to the topic everybody wants to talk about, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? And I'm just gonna call it Blue. I like Blue.

Okay.

Zor Gorelov (1:24)

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Zor Gorelov, I'm CEO of Blue, Blue Language Labs.

I'm an entrepreneur, software engineer by training. I started my career at Bell Labs, working on some of the early implementations of DARPA-sponsored speech recognition systems. Then I co-founded three enterprise software, Cloud and AI companies, my last company, Cosisto. We built conversational assistance and chatbots for banks around the world. The JP Morgan, TD Bank, Westpac, Emirates Bank were all customers.

My founder and CTO is Piotr. Piotr was the founder and CTO of Secure and Pay. Secure and Pay was one of the early payment, online payment companies that was acquired by Shift4 and now powers their payment infrastructure.

Sarah Stapp (2:19)

Oh, wow. Very cool. That is quite a legacy you've left behind and you've got a lot coming forward here too. So I want to just go ahead and dig in. Let's start with the big distinction because it sounds simple, right? But it really isn't.

You draw a hard line between executing actions and doing business. What is that distinction and why does it matter?

Zor Gorelov (2:42)

Well, think about what agents do today, right? Agents can search, agents can recommend, make a payment. They can act, but acting is not doing real business. Doing business is about generating revenue through assembling offers, finding partnerships, and ultimately managing agreements, managing entire process from agreements to settle. That's what we call doing real business.

Blue, by the way, Blue stands for basic language for unified experience. It's an open source protocol that allows agents to do a real business.

Kara Parkey (3:22)

So for the audience in this world of AI and agents, what breaks when an agent makes a commitment that nothing in the system can enforce or verify?

Zor Gorelov (3:33)

That's a great question.

Commitment breaking is about breaking promise. But if promise itself is not defined in the grid upon, it's really hard to know what it really means to break commitment. So what we do at Blue, each Blue document or Blue contract, by the way, you can think of Blue as a smart contract infrastructure, but no blockchain, I'm sure we will get to it.

Everyogenic action, every rule, every participants are encoded in the document itself. So you know what that promise is. So when commitments are broken, there is a full auditable, verifiable history of that broken commitment. If you don't have that, it's no longer about breaking commitment. It's about breaking accountability and trust and breaking the Agenic system.

Kara Parkey (4:22)

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Sarah Stapp (4:23)

Yeah, exactly.

Digging into that just a little more for our audience as well, you mentioned that I've heard of Blue being compared to smart contracts for business processes without the blockchain. Is there anything else you would add to that that you think our audience should think about?

Zor Gorelov (4:42)

Well, I think this comparison makes sense to extend that Blue contracts or Blue documents are executable and they are deterministic. So that is the core of it.

They work with existing infrastructure and existing payment rails. And what sets Blue documents for blockchain smart contracts is this thing called timeline.