Akamai and Visa Tackle Identity and Fraud in Agentic Shopping

Akamai Technologies and Visa are betting that agentic commerce will not scale without a verifiable trust layer. Their newly announced collaboration integrates Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s edge-based behavioral intelligence to help merchants authenticate AI shopping agents, identify the consumers behind them, and reduce fraud before transactions reach sensitive systems.

The move signals an early but important attempt to formalize identity, intent, and accountability in a world where autonomous agents increasingly act as economic participants.

Why Agentic Commerce Changes the Risk Equation

Traditional e-commerce security models are designed around human behavior. Bots, historically, have been treated as threats to be blocked. Agentic commerce upends that logic by introducing legitimate automated traffic that merchants actually want to serve.

An AI agent searching for the best deal, reserving inventory, or completing a checkout flow looks operationally similar to a malicious bot unless merchants can verify intent and identity. Without that distinction, businesses risk either exposing themselves to fraud or breaking legitimate AI-driven shopping experiences.

This is where the Akamai–Visa collaboration positions itself. By combining Visa’s agent authentication framework with Akamai’s real-time behavioral and network intelligence, merchants gain visibility into AI agent activity before it interacts with checkout systems, payment credentials, or customer accounts.

“The promise of agentic commerce hinges on recognition: the fundamental ability to trust an agent acting on someone’s behalf,” said Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy, Akamai Technologies. “By combining Visa Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai's deep user recognition and threat intelligence, we're working to solve the dual-identity challenge that’s crucial to AI commerce. We prove both who the agent is and, critically, who it represents. This is what transforms AI agents from novelties into trusted economic actors.”

Identity, Intent, and the Consumer Relationship

At the heart of agentic commerce is a delicate balance. Merchants must allow AI agents to transact while preserving visibility into the consumer relationship. Losing that connection risks breaking personalization, loyalty, and risk controls that businesses rely on.

Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to let AI agents securely transmit information about their authorization, shopping mission, and payment credentials using standard web infrastructure. Akamai extends that signal by preserving identity context at the edge, maintaining continuity across browsing, checkout, and payment flows.

The combined approach aims to answer three operational questions merchants increasingly face:

• Is this AI agent legitimate?

• Who is the consumer behind it?

• Is this transaction behaving as expected?

For Visa, this is less about enabling new payment methods and more about protecting existing ones as AI becomes an intermediary.

“Agentic commerce is unlocking an entirely new wave of digital interactions, but it can only scale if every player in the ecosystem can trust the agents participating in it,” said Jack Forestell, Visa Chief Product & Strategy Officer. “By collaborating with Akamai to deploy Trusted Agent Protocol, we’re delivering the real-time intelligence merchants need to support AI-driven experiences without introducing new risk. This is how we help the industry move confidently into the next era of commerce.”

Rising Bot Traffic Makes Trust Non-Negotiable

The timing of the partnership is not accidental. According to Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic surged 300 percent over the past year, with the commerce sector alone seeing more than 25 billion AI bot requests in a two-month period.

That volume blurs the line between automation that adds value and automation that exploits scale. Without authentication mechanisms, merchants are forced into blunt security controls that can degrade customer experience or expose them to abuse.

Trusted Agent Protocol addresses this by allowing merchants to differentiate browsing agents from paying agents, validate how payment information is presented, and maintain predictable checkout behavior. Akamai’s role is to enforce those expectations in real time, detecting anomalies before fraud materializes.

Operational Impact for Merchants

For large retailers, the practical appeal lies in minimal disruption. The protocol is designed to work with existing web and checkout infrastructure, reducing friction for adoption across Visa’s global merchant base.

The collaboration focuses on three operational outcomes:

• Clear agent identification and intent recognition

• Secure linkage between agent and consumer identity

• Predictable, protected payment interactions

This matters for scale. Nine of the world’s top ten retailers already rely on Akamai to manage performance and security during peak demand. Extending that trust model to agent-driven commerce allows merchants to experiment with AI shopping experiences without rearchitecting their security stack.

The Bigger Shift in Digital Commerce

Agentic commerce represents more than a technical upgrade. It signals a redefinition of who participates in transactions and how trust is established. AI agents, if left unmanaged, could fragment accountability across platforms, merchants, and payment networks.

By formalizing identity and intent, Akamai and Visa are attempting to set early guardrails for a market that is evolving faster than regulation or consumer norms. Whether this approach becomes an industry standard will depend on how widely merchants adopt agent-friendly commerce models and how transparently AI agents represent consumer interests.

For now, the collaboration underscores a simple reality: in a world where machines shop, trust becomes infrastructure.