Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that protects business online, announced a collaboration with Visa (NYSE: V) to bring identity, user recognition, and security controls to the world of agentic commerce. Via its integration of Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s edge-based behavioral intelligence, user recognition, and bot and abuse protection, the companies “will deliver the identity, authentication, and fraud controls required to let merchants confidently welcome AI agents with commerce intent into their digital storefronts.”
As autonomous AI agents increasingly “browse, compare, and purchase on behalf of consumers, merchants face a new array of challenges.”
Merchants must now be able to differentiate “this new type of legitimate automated traffic by authenticating the agent, identifying the user interacting with it, and ensuring the interaction is safe and trusted. Without this trust layer, merchants risk losing control of personalization, security, and the consumer relationship.”
Through the Trusted Agent Protocol’s agent authentication framework and Akamai’s edge-based behavioral intelligence and user recognition, merchants gain “access to precise, real-time insight into AI agent activity before it touches sensitive systems.”
This unified approach enables merchants to “differentiate trusted AI agents from malicious bots – unlocking the potential of agentic commerce.”
With Trusted Agent Protocol supported across Akamai Cloud, the world’s distributed cloud platform, merchants can “operate at the speed and scale agentic commerce demands.”
According to Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic has “surged 300% over the past year.”
The commerce industry experienced “more than 25 billion AI bot requests during a two-month period.”
As agent-generated traffic accelerates, the risk surface “expands and the need for verifiable identity becomes critical.”
Trusted Agent Protocol addresses this need directly by helping to ensure that every AI agent paying “with a Visa credential is trusted, authenticated, and operating as intended.”
Using industry standard web infrastructure, Trusted Agent Protocol allows agents to transmit information “to merchants to show that the agent is approved for its specific shopping mission, provide visibility into the consumer making the transaction, and securely pass payment information through a merchant’s preferred checkout flow.”
Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to scale “with minimal infrastructure and user experience (UX) changes, making it easy for 175 million Visa accepting merchant locations around the globe to adopt agentic commerce – without compromising security, control.”
Akamai and Visa are working to help merchants:
Clearly identify a legitimate AI agent and its intent:
- Visa Trusted Agent Protocol helps merchants differentiate whether an agent is browsing or paying, while Akamai strengthens that signal with real-time behavioral and network intelligence to detect anomalies.
Link the agent to the underlying user:
- Trusted Agent Protocol helps agents pass pertinent information to connect each verified agent to the consumer it represents, and Akamai preserves that identity through edge-based user recognition, maintaining the risk posture, trust signals, and account context merchants rely on to detect and prevent fraud.
Enable payment interactions:
- Trusted Agent Protocol assists agents with conveying payment information in the manner a merchant expects an agent to pay, from network tokens to micropayments. Akamai reinforces these flows with end-to-end protection, validating agent authenticity and helping to prevent fraud or abuse before it impacts the transaction.
Retailers rely on Akamai to power and protect digital commerce, supporting shopping experiences.
As explained in a release, Akamai helps e-commerce professionals handle peak traffic, “accelerate performance, and safeguard online storefronts at global scale.”
As noted in the update, Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that “powers and protects business online.”
Their security solutions, threat intelligence, and operations team aim to provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications.
Akamai’s cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s distributed platform.
Global enterprises leverage Akamai to provide expertise they “need to grow their business.”