Akamai and Visa collaborating to secure agentic commerce

Akamai is collaborating with Visa to develop security solutions for the emerging agentic commerce market. The partnership will involve the integration of Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s edge-based behavioural intelligence, user recognition and bot and abuse protection capabilities, in a bid to develop the identity, authentication and fraud controls required for merchants to allow AI agents with commerce intent into their digital storefronts.

Autonomous AI agents are increasingly being used to browse, compare and purchase on behalf of consumers, which is requiring merchants to develop the capabilities to differentiate this type of automated traffic by authenticating the agent and identifying the user interacting with it.

The partners believe that Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol’s agent authentication framework and Akamai’s behavioural intelligence and user recognition capabilities will enable merchants to differentiate trusted agents from malicious bots before they can touch sensitive systems.

Every AI agent paying with a Visa credential will need to be trusted and authenticated. The Trusted Agent Protocol platform will allow agents to transmit information to merchants to show that they are approved for specific shopping missions, and provide visibility into the consumer making the transaction. Akamai will strengthen these signals with real-time behavioural and network intelligence to detect anomalies, and to preserve identities through edge-based user recognition. Akamai technology will also be used to provide end-to-end protection and validate agent authenticity during payment interactions.

Akamai CTO for Security Strategy Patrick Sullivan said the promise of agentic commerce hinges on the ability to trust an agent working on a buyer’s behalf.

“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,” he said. “We prove both who the agent is and, critically, who it represents. This is what transforms AI agents from novelties into trusted economic actors.”

Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell added that agentic commerce will only be able to scale if every player in the ecosystem can trust the agents participating in it.

“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,” he said. “This is how we help the industry move confidently into the next era of commerce.”

Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report estimates that AI-powered bot traffic has surged 300% over the past year, with the commerce industry alone experiencing more than 25 billion AI bot requests during a two-month period.

Image credit: iStock.com/Techa Tungateja