Smart Agents as Customers: A Semi-Autonomous Digital Commerce Model for Industry 5.0

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the rapid popularization of smart applications based on sensors, devices, and systems. As Industry 5.0 emerges, IoT rapidly evolves—not into full automation, but rather into human-machine collaboration, sustainability, and resiliency. Unlike its predecessors, which aimed for complete automation, Industry 5.0 focuses on intelligent automation that works alongside expert humans, enhancing decision-making through technology rather than making them redundant. This paper presents a novel semi-autonomous IoT infrastructure that introduces the concepts of "Smart Agents as Customers" and "Machine Customers" for industry and smart home applications. The proposed system complies with the principles of Industry 5.0 through AI-driven automation, thus ensuring adaptation, ethical governance, and transparent operation of the system under human intervention. The infrastructure integrates machine learning, blockchain, and smart contracts within Web 3.0 technology to create an automated decision support tool that understands and fulfills supply needs through sensors. The system enables verifiable tracking of what is shared, by whom, when, with which tools, and for what purposes, creating a facilitating network structure. The main contribution lies in introducing a new customer concept in IoT, supply chain, and e-commerce domains through the "Agents as a Customer" paradigm and designing an IoT infrastructure incorporating next-generation technologies (Industry 5.0, Web 3.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain). This approach enables transformation of customer interactions, semi-automation of purchases, and cryptocurrency-based payment systems, offering significant academic, social, and economic implications for future IoT infrastructures and applications.