COSTA MESA, CALIF. -- Experian announced that Akamai Technologies has joined its growing partner ecosystem, designed to further advance secure, trusted AI driven commerce through the Experian Agent Trust™ framework, alongside partner Skyfire supporting emerging payment innovation.

As AI agents begin to search, decide, and transact autonomously, they introduce a fundamental challenge for businesses: how to trust an action when it is no longer directly initiated by a human. Without a verified connection between humans and AI agents, autonomous commerce introduces new risks in fraud, misrepresentation, and unauthorized transactions. Experian Agent Trust is designed to address this challenge by establishing identity, accountability, and trust in agent driven interactions.

“Trust, security, and performance must scale alongside the growing role of AI agents in digital commerce,” said Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer at Experian. “Agentic commerce will not scale without trust. By adding Akamai to our partner ecosystem, we are strengthening the infrastructure to verify agents, the humans behind them, and their intent, enabling fast, secure, and accountable transactions. This reflects strong momentum across our ecosystem as we bring together leaders in identity, payments, and cybersecurity to shape the future of digital commerce.”

Akamai is a global leader in cybersecurity and edge computing. Its capabilities strengthen Experian’s Agent Trust framework by supporting secure delivery, controlling bot and agent activity, and helping protect transactions in real time.

“Agent-driven commerce introduces a new set of security expectations for businesses and consumers,” said Akamai’s Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy. “Our work with Experian brings together identity intelligence and edge security so organizations can confidently interact with AI agents while maintaining performance and trust across every touchpoint.”

Together, Experian and Akamai help organizations authenticate AI agents and better protect digital commerce environments as this new model continues to evolve.

Advancing the KYA Standard with KYAPay

Experian, Akamai and Skyfire are active members of the KYAPay initiative (https://kyapay.org/), an extension of the Know Your Agent protocol. KYAPay introduces a standardized way to declare agent intent and enables tokenized payment credentials, supporting secure and seamless agent driven commerce experiences.

Know Your Agent provides AI agent developers with a consistent method to identify themselves, the platforms they operate on, and the users they represent. For businesses, it offers a scalable framework to authenticate AI agents and understand who they represent and why they are acting.

“Standardizing how AI agents declare intent and transact is key to unlocking the full potential of agentic commerce,” said Amir Sarhangi, CEO and co-founder of Skyfire. “Through our collaboration in Experian’s partner ecosystem and the KYAPay initiative, we enable secure, tokenized payments that unify identity, authorization, and execution in a trusted framework.”

Strengthening the Trust Stack for Agentic Commerce

Within Experian’s partner ecosystem, Akamai’s capabilities will work alongside Experian’s identity and fraud prevention services to support a layered approach to trust.

Human to Agent Binding will connect verified consumers, devices, and AI agents. Experian will issue an Experian Agent Trust token that validates identity, consent, delegated authority, and transaction risk in real time. Akamai will extend this model by adding an independent security layer of verification, trust evaluation, and enforcement at the edge.

This human to agent binding will create a secure, persistent link between verified individuals, their devices, and the AI agents acting on their behalf, enabling a continuous, auditable understanding of who the user is and how the agent behaves over time.

Beyond bot traffic, Akamai will evaluate both human and agent driven traffic in real time, validating agent identity, correlating it with behavioral signals and user context, and assessing intent. By combining declared identity with continuous analysis and edge based decisioning, Akamai will help ensure that only verified, trustworthy users and agents are able to access and transact with merchant systems.

These combined capabilities will support a more seamless path from AI generated recommendations to completed purchases, with transparency and security maintained throughout the experience.

Built for the Future of Commerce

Experian’s Agent Trust services will be platform agnostic and integrate with existing commerce and payment systems. They will be supported by the Experian Agent Registry, which maintains dynamic trust scoring for human bonded AI agents.

These capabilities will build on Experian’s leadership in identity verification and fraud prevention, helping clients avoid an estimated 15 to 19 billion dollars in fraud losses each year.