The task, as typed by an office manager at 11:02 on a Tuesday: \"Get lunch for the twelve of us, the usual place if they can do it by one, otherwise anywhere decent nearby. Budget one-fifty. Two vegetarians, one no gluten.\"
\nWhat followed, reconstructed from the agent's own log.
\n11:02. The agent resolves \"the usual place\" from the last six lunch orders in the office's records. Four were from the same deli. It calls that the usual place.
\n11:02. It checks the deli's ordering page. The page is up. Group orders require a phone call for more than ten people. The agent notes this and does not call, because it has not been told it may make phone calls and has no way to prove to the deli who it is calling for.
\n11:03. It searches for alternatives within a ten-minute walk with online ordering that accepts group orders. Three candidates. It discards one for having no gluten-free option marked.
\n11:04. It requests the two remaining menus as structured data rather than pages. One site serves a machine-readable menu. The other does not; the agent reads the page and extracts what it can, flagging two items where it is not certain about ingredients.
\n11:05. It builds an order at each: twelve mains, two vegetarian, one gluten-free, drinks, within budget. Site A comes to a hundred and thirty-eight. Site B, a hundred and fifty-two, over budget, so it drops the drinks at B to bring it under.
\n11:06. It checks whether either site will recognise the office as a returning customer. Site A accepts a business credential; the agent presents one, minted for that site, naming the office's verified company record and the agent's key. Site A's page now shows the office's saved delivery instructions and a returning-customer discount of five percent. Site B has no such mechanism and would require an account with a password the agent does not hold.
\n11:06. Site A, with the discount, comes to a hundred and thirty-one. The agent chooses Site A.
\n11:07. Payment. Site A offers a card on file, which the agent cannot use because it does not hold the card, and a per-request payment rail, which it can. It signs an authorisation for a hundred and thirty-one and change. The site's facilitator settles it. Receipt, transaction reference, delivery window twelve-forty to one.
\n11:07. The agent writes to the office manager: what was ordered, from where, for how much, why not the usual place, the two menu items it was unsure about, and the receipt. Total elapsed time, five minutes.
\n12:48. Sandwiches.
\nThe fourteen decisions were mostly ordinary. The two that were not were the credential and the payment: the moments where the agent had to be someone, and had to pay as someone, and had a way to do both without carrying the office's passwords or its card. A year ago both of those would have ended with the agent writing \"I've got this ready, can you log in and pay?\"
\nThe office manager, asked afterwards whether she had noticed anything about the process, said she had noticed the discount.
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