According to ZDNet, Visa and cybersecurity company Akamai Technologies announced a collaboration on Wednesday to address security in “agentic commerce,” where AI bots make purchases. The partnership uses Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol alongside Akamai’s threat intelligence to verify both the identity of an AI agent and the human it represents. This comes as Akamai’s own 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report found AI-powered bot traffic has surged 300% in the past year. The initiative builds on Visa’s “Intelligent Commerce” launch from May, which offers AI-ready credit cards and payment support for developers. The goal is to enable Visa’s 175 million merchant locations to adopt agentic commerce with minimal infrastructure changes, providing end-to-end protection for these autonomous transactions.
The bot identity crisis
Here’s the core problem they’re trying to solve. When a bot shows up at a digital checkout, how does the merchant know it’s your helpful AI assistant and not a malicious actor trying to drain your account? It’s a dual-identity challenge. The system has to prove the agent is who it says it is and that it’s actually working for you. Patrick Sullivan from Akamai put it well: this verification is what turns AI agents from “novelties into trusted economic actors.” Without that trust, the whole idea of autonomous shopping grinds to a halt. Who would enable a bot to buy things if you couldn’t be sure it was your bot?
Why this matters beyond your cart
This isn’t just about securing your holiday gift purchase. It’s about laying the foundational plumbing for a new era of automated commerce. Think beyond shopping—imagine AI agents managing business supply chains, automatically reordering office supplies, or handling routine procurement. The stakeholder impact is huge. For users, it’s about convenience without fear. For developers, Visa is providing a protocol to build on, which could standardize a chaotic space. And for enterprises, reliable agentic transactions could unlock massive efficiency gains. But it all hinges on security. A few high-profile agent-based fraud disasters could kill the trend before it even starts.
The race to set the rules
Look, Visa isn’t the only player seeing this future. Google launched its own Agent Payments Protocol in September. This is quickly becoming a race to establish the security standard for AI commerce. The company that defines how trust is verified in these transactions could effectively set the rules for the market. Visa has a massive advantage with its existing merchant network. If they can make the transition “seamless” for those 175 million locations, as they claim, that’s a powerful incentive for adoption. They’re basically trying to future-proof their network for a world where bots, not just people, are the primary customers.
A skeptical eye
So, will it work? The technical approach—linking Visa’s authentication with Akamai’s behavioral intelligence at the edge—sounds robust. But I have questions. How “minimal” are those UX changes really? Will users have to jump through new hoops to authorize their agents, adding friction back into a process meant to be frictionless? And what about the privacy implications of that end-to-end identity preservation? It’s a classic trade-off: security versus convenience. The success of this whole venture won’t just be in stopping fraud. It’ll be in stopping fraud without you even noticing it’s there. That’s the real challenge. If they get it right, letting an AI handle your shopping might soon feel as normal as using a credit card online does today.
