Akamai and Visa have announced a strategic collaboration to secure the emerging world of agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents browse, compare and purchase on behalf of consumers. The partnership integrates Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s edge-based behavioural intelligence, user recognition and bot/abuse protection to give merchants a robust trust layer for AI-driven traffic.
The goal is to solve the “dual identity” problem of agentic commerce: merchants must know both which agent is calling their APIs and who that agent represents. By authenticating AI agents and linking them to verified end-users before they touch sensitive systems, the two companies aim to let merchants confidently welcome legitimate AI agents while blocking malicious bots, impersonators and abuse traffic.
Why a Trust Layer for Agentic Commerce Now
According to Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic has surged 300% in the past year, with commerce platforms alone seeing over 25 billion AI bot requests in just two months. As AI shopping agents and scrapers flood the web, traditional bot detection and fraud tools struggle to distinguish between helpful automation and harmful activity.
Without a robust trust framework, agentic commerce creates new risks: loss of control over personalisation, skewed analytics, novel fraud patterns and erosion of the direct customer relationship. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to address this by allowing only approved AI agents to transact with Visa credentials, while Akamai’s edge network provides real-time, pre-transaction visibility into agent behaviour, risk posture and intent.
How Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol Works With Akamai Cloud
Trusted Agent Protocol uses standard web infrastructure to let AI agents present verifiable signals to merchants: proof that the agent is authorised for a specific “shopping mission”, visibility into the consumer behind the agent and secure passing of payment details through the merchant’s preferred checkout flow. Every AI agent paying with a Visa credential must be authenticated and approved, with the protocol designed to scale across 175 million Visa-accepting merchant locations worldwide.
Akamai layers its edge-based behavioural intelligence and user recognition on top of this. Merchants can distinguish whether an agent is only browsing or actually paying, detect anomalies in traffic patterns or device fingerprints, and preserve a consistent risk and identity context across sessions. This combination lets merchants treat AI agents as first-class, recognised actors—with identity and accountability—rather than generic automated traffic.
What This Means for Merchants and CXOs
For retailers and digital platforms already serving heavy AI-generated traffic (price comparison bots, shopping assistants, LLM-powered concierge apps), the Akamai–Visa model offers three practical benefits:
Clear agent identification and intent: Trusted Agent Protocol signals whether an AI agent is on a discovery, comparison or payment mission, while Akamai validates that behaviour at the edge.
Strong linkage to the end-user: Merchant systems can tie each trusted agent back to a known consumer identity, preserving existing risk scores, loyalty data and fraud controls.
Predictable, secure payments: Payment interactions follow merchant-approved flows—network tokens, micropayments, recurring models—while Akamai enforces end-to-end protection so abuse is stopped before it hits transaction systems.
With nine of the world’s top 10 retailers already relying on Akamai, the collaboration signals how quickly agentic commerce is moving from concept to implementation. For CXOs, it also underlines a broader shift: in the era of AI agents, identity, risk and customer experience must be re-architected together—not treated as separate stacks.
