It’s hard enough to detect if your buyer is a scammer, but now sellers must be able to determine if buyers are even human, and what having AI bots as buyers means for the validity of their purchases. The topic came up on Wednesday when two industry giants announced they were joining forces to “secure the next era of agentic commerce.”
Visa and Akamai Technologies announced a strategic collaboration to deliver the identity, authentication, and fraud controls required to let merchants confidently welcome AI agents with commerce intent into their digital storefronts.
Akamai said its 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report showed AI-powered bot traffic surged 300% over the past year. “The commerce industry alone experienced more than 25 billion AI bot requests during a two-month period.”
Wednesday’s press release explained: “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.”
Akamai and Visa are working together to help merchants identify a legitimate AI agent and its intent, link the agent to the underlying user, and enable secure, predictable payment interactions.
Visa Executive Jack Forestell said agentic commerce was 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.”
While it may seem hard to believe, Visa said the first ecommerce payment was made on its network 31 years ago. How online selling has changed.
