Two AI companies. One signed agreement. One settled invoice.
This isn’t a logo-on-each-other’s-site partnership
The Agents and The Dutch Zero Human Company have an operational collaboration with formal paperwork, real financial exchange between AI-powered organisations, and ongoing technical and strategic exchange.
A signed cooperation agreement. A completed commercial transaction — invoiced, settled, on the books. To our knowledge, one of the first commercial exchanges of its kind in the Netherlands.
How The Agents and The Dutch Zero Human Company build the future of work in public. With paperwork, with money, and with the hard lessons that don’t show up in vendor demos.
TL;DR. The Agents has an active, formalised collaboration with The Dutch Zero Human Company, Olivier Rikken’s semi-autonomous Zero Human Company. We have a signed cooperation agreement and a completed commercial transaction between our two AI-powered companies. To our knowledge, it is one of the first of its kind in the Netherlands. We share governance frameworks, operational patterns, and lessons from production, including the hard ones.
This isn’t a logo-on-each-other’s-site partnership
Most partnership pages on the internet are decorative. Two logos, a friendly handshake metaphor, a vague paragraph about “synergy”. This isn’t that.
The Agents and The Dutch Zero Human Company have an operational collaboration with formal paperwork, real financial exchange between AI-powered organisations, and ongoing technical and strategic exchange. We work together because we’re building the same future from two different angles. And we learn faster when we do it in the open.
What’s real about this collaboration
A signed cooperation agreement
Between The Agents and The Dutch Zero Human Company. The agreement formalises how we work together, share findings, build on each other’s progress, and credit each other’s contributions. It’s an actual document, not a verbal arrangement, and it sets the terms for the operational collaboration that follows from it.
A completed commercial transaction
Between our two organisations. Invoiced. Settled. On the books on both sides. To our knowledge this is one of the first real commercial exchanges of its kind in the Netherlands. A transaction between two AI-powered companies for work delivered by one side to the other.
This is not a footnote. It’s the moment “AI companies doing business with AI companies” stopped being a thought experiment and started being a balance sheet entry. We’re not waiting for that future. We’re already trading in it.
The point of naming this commercial transaction is not the size of it. It’s the precedent. Most of what gets written about AI-to-AI commerce assumes it’s years away. We’re saying: here is one that already happened, between two named Dutch companies, in 2026.
Who runs The Dutch Zero Human Company
Olivier Rikken is a visiting researcher at TU Delft and practitioner-entrepreneur at Emerging Horizons. His work focuses on AI, blockchain, smart contracts, governance, and the design of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Zero Human Companies.
Olivier runs two ZHC experiments in parallel. ZeroHumanOS is fully autonomous, built on Polsia. The Dutch Zero Human Company is semi-autonomous, built on Paperclip, with Olivier himself as the human board for crucial decisions. We collaborate with the latter.
His perspective shows up in BNR Nieuwsradio interviews, on LinkedIn, and in the academic literature on autonomous organisations. He is one of the few people in Europe pushing the governance question on AI workforces with both academic rigour and lived operational experience.
Visit dutchzerohumancompany.com →
What we share, in both directions
Lessons from production, including the hard ones
Building autonomous systems in the real world means absorbing failures that don’t exist in whitepapers. Early in DZHC’s operation, a financial agent’s credentials were briefly exposed and a wallet was drained by a hostile actor within minutes. The technical details aren’t the point. The point is that this is what production looks like when AI agents handle real value, and the lessons that came out of that incident now sit in our defaults on both sides.
These are the lessons that don’t show up in vendor demos. They’re also the ones that shape how we build.
Governance frameworks
How do humans stay meaningfully in charge of an organisation that mostly runs itself? Where do decisions need oversight, where don’t they, and how do you enforce that boundary technically? DZHC pushes this question harder than almost anyone, with active research on the academic side and live experimentation on the operational side. The patterns DZHC validates feed directly into how we structure agent workforces for clients.
Operational patterns
How agents communicate with each other. How they hand off work. How they escalate ambiguous calls to humans. How they recover from failure without making things worse. How they build verifiable identities of their own so other agents (and other humans) can trust who they’re talking to. Both sides are figuring out at the same time what “professional conduct” looks like for software.
Strategic direction
What business models are viable for AI-first companies. Where legal frameworks need to catch up (the EU AI Act, Dutch corporate law, GDPR in agent contexts). What new categories of work AI agents unlock that didn’t exist before. These are the strategic conversations that shape both organisations.
Why this benefits every client of The Agents
Every client of The Agents indirectly benefits from this collaboration. The governance frameworks DZHC pioneers go into how we structure your agent workforce. The hard lessons around security, identity, and financial controls are baked into our defaults before you encounter them. You’re not the first to find out where AI agents break. We already found out, and we built around it.
Working with The Agents means working with a team that has access to one of the most advanced live experiments on AI workforce governance in Europe. That’s not a marketing claim. That’s an operational fact, formalised in our cooperation agreement.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Zero Human Company?
A Zero Human Company (ZHC) is an organisation where automation, typically AI agents and sometimes combined with smart contracts, handles day-to-day operations, decision-making, and execution. Zero Human Companies can be fully autonomous (no human in the loop) or semi-autonomous (a human board for crucial decisions). The Dutch Zero Human Company is the latter.
How is a Zero Human Company different from a DAO?
A DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is typically co-owned, blockchain-based, and governed by token-holder voting with smart contracts handling execution. A Zero Human Company can be owned by a single person, is primarily AI-based rather than blockchain-based, and uses an army of AI agents to handle operations. Less blockchain, more AI.
Is The Agents itself a Zero Human Company?
No. The Agents is an AI-first company that builds AI workforces for clients. The Dutch Zero Human Company is an operational experiment in running a company as autonomously as possible. The distinction matters. We deploy AI agents into existing businesses. DZHC explores what happens when you build the whole company that way from the ground up.
What was the commercial transaction between The Agents and DZHC?
Work delivered by one organisation to the other, invoiced and settled between two AI-powered companies. We’re intentionally not making the dollar amount the point. The precedent is what matters. To our knowledge, it is one of the first transactions of this kind in the Netherlands.
Why publish a partnership this openly?
Because the questions we’re working on (AI workforce governance, human-in-the-loop boundaries, autonomous-organisation legal frameworks) are too important to figure out behind closed doors. Both The Agents and DZHC believe this stuff benefits from being built in public. Other people building in this space should be able to learn from our mistakes, not repeat them.
Can other AI companies work with The Agents or DZHC?
Yes. We’re actively looking for other AI-first organisations to collaborate with. On research, on operational patterns, and on commercial transactions that test what AI-to-AI commerce can actually look like. If that’s you, get in touch.
Want to learn more, or collaborate?
If you’re building in the autonomous-organisation space, running an AI-first company, or just want to understand what AI workforce governance looks like in practice, we’re happy to talk. Reach out to either organisation, or both.