This week we hear from Maine Pointe, the supply chain consultancy, which is breaking free from parent company SGS and is using AI to power its new, independent future. In other news, two companies, Cloudflare Inc. and Onton, are tackling the issue of trust and authenticity in the agentic commerce space, albeit in different ways.
Leaving the nest
Maine Point, the global supply chain and operations consulting firm, is now on its own. The company was acquired from SGS, and the deal was led by Joseph Esteves, Maine Pointe’s chief executive officer.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“The transaction establishes Maine Pointe as an independent, management-owned firm and gives the company greater flexibility to invest in its people, technology and client delivery model,” the company said in a statement, adding that it will now “move faster and with greater agility, helping chief executives, private equity sponsors and operating leaders accelerate measurable improvements in profitability, cash generation, operational performance and enterprise value.”
The company said it has over 20 years of implementation experience with AI capabilities along with a highly scalable delivery model. Maine Pointe said it has learned that AI creates the most value when it is combined “with deep industry and operational expertise and tied directly to a company’s organizational and financial goals.”
Esteves said the company’s relationship with SGS “was an important and positive chapter in Maine Pointe’s growth, and we are grateful for the support, global perspective and opportunities it provided,” said Esteves.
“As an independent company, we can now move faster, invest more aggressively in AI and digital innovation, expand our world-class talent base and stay completely focused on one thing: helping our clients drive rapid, measurable results,” the CEO added.
The company said the buyout provides full continuity of its business and existing client teams and contractual commitments as well as performance guarantees.
“What remains unchanged is our responsibility to work alongside clients and deliver measurable results,” Esteves said. “What changes is our ability to make decisions with greater speed, focus and ownership.”
It’s all about trust
Onton is launching Ontology 1, a trust and authenticity model for agentic commerce, which involves AI agents to research, recommend and even make purchases for consumers. And therein lies the problem: when agents search, they could be finding data on products that are synthetic or manipulated and not authentic.
The company said the agent has no reliable way “to distinguish signal from noise and proceeds to recommend anyway.” Shoppers end up buying based on information that was never trustworthy to begin with. This is where Ontology 1 helps.
Onton said the model was built from scratch. “In head-to-head benchmarks against the most dominant players in product discovery, including Google Shopping and Amazon, Onton’s model outperformed on accuracy across every dimension tested,” the company said in a statement. “The gap is sharpest in a domain where accuracy has historically been hardest to achieve: interpreting the veracity of product information.”
Alex Gunnarson, co-founder of Onton, said the market is focused on building smarter agents. “We’re focused on a different question: what should those agents trust?” he said. “As commerce moves from clicks to conversations and eventually autonomous actions, the quality of information underneath those decisions becomes critical infrastructure.”
Onton solves this problem by assessing both the product itself and the reliability of its surrounding data. By decoding the reasoning and visual cues behind user preferences, the company said the platform converts these inputs into valuable insights rather than discarding them as clutter. As a result, AI agents deliver shopping recommendations rooted in verified data.
Alongside its launch, Onton released research revealing that current top AI models struggle to filter out fake content and biased reviews—proving that today’s systems simply aren’t built for modern, noisy web environments.
“We believe the next major internet platform will not be defined solely by who has the best model,” said Zach Hudson, co-founder of Onton. “It will be defined by who can provide the most trustworthy foundation for those models to operate on.”
Making safe purchases
Cloudflare Inc. is also addressing issues of safety and trust in agentic commerce. The connectivity cloud company said Tuesday that it is rolling out Cloudflare Wallets and Cloudflare.pay, which will give AI agents that are deployed on Cloudflare “a stable identity and the ability to make purchases online safely within limits set by their human creators.”
The company said that as AI agents troll the internet and browse websites as well as make purchases autonomously, they are becoming a normal way of doing business online. “But the Internet was built for humans, not agents,” the company said, adding that when an agent visits a site to buy something or sign up for a free trial, “the business on the other end has no reliable way to tell whether it’s a real customer’s assistant or a bad actor gaming the system.”
“The internet is shifting from human-driven browsing to agent-driven commerce, and the infrastructure needs to keep up,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “When an agent shows up at your door, you need to know who sent it. Cloudflare can give agents a face—a link to the human or organization that owns them—so that trust, accountability and real commerce can follow. It’s the identity and payment infrastructure the agentic web needs to function.”