Inside Vendee Labs: Darryl Carlton and Ross Gardiner on Building Buyer-First Agentic Commerce

In this episode, we take a deep dive into what buyer-side agentic commerce could actually look like. The conversation explores the origins of the company, why Darryl and Ross focused on reducing friction for buyers, and how that unexpectedly opened up solutions for sellers, payment providers, and enterprise procurement teams as well.

The episode also features a live demo of Vendee Labs’ platform, showing conversational discovery, real-time product retrieval, multi-vendor carting, and a multi-item ACP checkout flow. 

Highlights

• Why Vendee Labs is approaching agentic commerce from the buyer’s perspective
• The founding story behind the company and the friction that inspired it
• How ChatGPT and Claude changed the direction of the product
• A live demo of conversational commerce across real merchants
• What a multi-vendor, multi-item ACP checkout could mean for online shopping
• Why autonomous commerce needs legal and governance frameworks, not just AI
• The vision for a Universal Protocol Bridge across ACP, UCP, and future standards
• How strong permissions and audit trails could reduce chargebacks and disputes
• Why poor product data creates broken outcomes in agentic shopping
• Where Vendee Labs sees opportunity across consumer, B2B, procurement, and white-label use cases

Vendee Labs is betting that the future of commerce won’t just be agent-powered—it will be buyer-centered, trust-driven, and built to work across whatever protocols come next.

Timestamps:
 00:06:09 — Ross shares his background in global technology planning and delivery
00:07:23 — Darryl shares his background in retail IT, telecom, AI, and governance
00:08:53 — Darryl reflects on AI before and after the ChatGPT moment
00:10:03 — Discussion on LLMs, explainability, and true intelligence
00:11:26 — The founding story behind Vendee Labs
00:13:13 — How the product evolved into its current form
00:16:06 — The Vendee Labs pitch: changing how the world buys
00:17:06 — Why solving buyer friction also solves seller-side pain points
00:20:18 — Live demo begins
00:21:10 — Running shoes search and conversational discovery demo
00:25:42 — Multi-vendor cart and checkout walkthrough
00:31:06 — Why richer product data is critical for agentic commerce
00:35:46 — Consumer, B2B, procurement, and white-label distribution paths
00:38:46 — Team size, bootstrapping, and current company stage
00:40:39 — Ross outlines roadmap, buyer taxonomy, and MVP plans
00:42:15 — Scot and Darryl discuss adoption speed in agentic commerce
00:44:18 — Darryl’s theory on trust events and adoption
00:45:34 — Governance-by-design versus fixing broken outputs later
00:47:46 — Where to learn more and try the demo

👉 Connect with Darryl: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrylcarlton/
👉 Connect with Ross: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossgardiner/
👉 Check out the demo: https://vendeelabs.com/

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