What is Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) in Field Service?

A financial layer utilizing ECDSA cryptographic signatures that allows an orchestration agent to issue a Cart Mandate to a merchant agent, enabling autonomous settlement without exposing raw banking credentials. In the Field Service & HVAC sector specifically, Field service AP2 governs parts purchasing from service vehicles: per-job spending limits, warranty-covered vs. billable part authorization, and customer pre-approval requirements for non-standard repairs. Technician agents can autonomously purchase parts under $200 for warranty-covered repairs but must obtain customer approval for billable work.

Issuing spending keys without category restrictions, allowing agents to make purchases outside their intended scope Additionally, Implementing AP2 without a settlement audit trail, making transaction reconciliation impossible at month-end Additionally, Skipping the mandate expiration mechanism, allowing signed mandates to be replayed for duplicate charges Additionally, Not implementing a kill-switch that allows human operators to instantly revoke an agent's spending authority

Field Service organizations face specific challenges including dominant platforms like servicetitan suffer from extreme feature bloat and technicians overwhelmed by 90% irrelevant ui. Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) addresses these by delivering zero-trust settlement, cryptographic spending limits, instant escrow. A manufacturing plant deployed AP2 with spending keys for their inventory management agent. The agent was authorized to autonomously purchase raw materials up to $25K per order from pre-approved suppliers. When steel prices dropped 12% on a Tuesday, the agent immediately purchased 3 months of inventory at the lower price, saving $47K, without waiting for a human to notice the price movement and process a PO. The entire transaction, from price detection to settlement, completed in 8 seconds.