Inside Vendee Labs: Darryl Carlton and Ross Gardiner on Building Buyer-First Agentic Commerce
Vendee Labs co-founders Dr. Darryl Carlton and Ross Gardiner join Retailgentic to discuss protocol bridges, AI governance, autonomous buying, and a live multi-item ACP checkout demo.
This episode features two founders building buyer-first infrastructure for the future of agentic commerce.
Dr. Darryl Carlton brings a long career in IT, AI, governance, and large-scale systems design, with experience spanning retail, telecom, and major enterprise transformation projects.
Ross Gardiner brings deep expertise in technology planning, delivery, and complex systems execution across global markets.
Together, they’re building Vendee Labs around a core idea: if AI agents are going to reshape e-commerce, the buying experience itself needs to be rethought from the consumer side.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
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.
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.
Or, we have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!) →
Loving this Convo? We’re just getting started.
Stay on top of what’s happening in agentic commerce, from the tools powering it to the founders building with it by following us across platforms:
Podcast: https://retailgentic.transistor.fm
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retailgentic/
We're here to make sense of what’s next in retail + AI and bring you along for the ride. Subscribe and stay tuned!