Bad experiences put nearly $3 trillion of sales at risk this year⁴, more than half of cancellations arrive without a complaint⁵, and standard quality assurance reads two conversations in every hundred⁶. You end up buying new customers at five to twenty-five times the price of keeping the ones a read thread would have saved⁷.

Banks have paid more than $3bn in penalties for business done in unrecorded WhatsApp chats¹¹, the High Court has ruled a £248,000 contract was formed in one¹², and Awaab's Law now sets statutory repair deadlines because complaints once sat unread until a child died¹³. The fine is the smallest part: remediation, mandated monitoring and lost leadership time cost multiples more. Buying more software has not helped: customer-service technology spend is set to double by 2028 without cutting the labour¹⁴, and the average company already runs 305 SaaS applications, seven of them duplicate AI tools¹⁵. Nothing joins them up.

Teams lose more than eight working weeks a year hunting for information⁸, and miscommunication drives a $31bn annual rework bill in US construction alone⁹. You pay skilled salaries for relay work, and when the person who knows how things get done burns out and leaves, replacing them costs up to twice their salary¹⁰ — and the process goes too.

Automated traffic is already 53 per cent of the web¹⁶. Agents can now use tools, talk to each other and pay: MCP, A2A and payment rails from Visa, Mastercard, Google and Stripe are live¹⁷. Where no door exists they make one; in the past year agents have broken into another company's servers, run most of a state espionage campaign and deleted a production database¹⁸. Block them and you lose the best-converting traffic there is, up 393 per cent in a year¹⁹. Let them push through and you inherit the incident bill. The only cheap option is a door.