Why smaller-than-traditional consumer payments fail: "The function of prices is to let the shopper map personal resources (budget) to personal values (unique and not directly observable). This entails a significant mental cost." http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html … https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2015/10/minimizing-consumer-worry.html …
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Much easier said than done, alas.
For one reason because these agents are typically programmed by the vendor and collect information to manipulate us into buying things from said vendor, rather than working for the consumer to buy what they actually want badly enough and at the best price.
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The second reason is that discovering people's preferences -- how badly they want what products -- is a very difficult, usually infeasibly hard, UI problem.
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Third reason is that preferences and budgets are often very personal private info that can be used to harm people who share them. Again related to the vendor rather than the consumer writing the code and controlling such data.
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Those are all incidental features of how such software is unfortunately typically written though. In principle we can do this with privately controlled p2p software rather than SaaS. The harder problems, as you suggested are in easily and reliably specifying and executing intent.
End of conversation
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