Visa & Akamai partner to secure rising AI shopping

Visa has formed a strategic partnership with Akamai that aims to verify and secure AI "shopping agents" as they browse and pay on merchant websites, in a move that targets rising fraud risks from automated traffic.

The two companies will combine Visa's new Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai's security services delivered from its global cloud network. The integration focuses on identity, authentication and fraud controls for what the firms describe as "agentic commerce", where autonomous software agents act on behalf of consumers.

AI-driven agents are beginning to handle tasks such as product research, price comparison and checkout for users. Merchants must now distinguish between benign automated activity and hostile bots that attempt account takeover, card fraud or scraping of sensitive data.

Akamai data indicates that AI-powered bot traffic has increased by 300% over the past year. The company reported more than 25 billion AI bot requests against commerce sites during a two‑month period. The figures underscore a growing volume of machine-generated traffic reaching online storefronts.

Visa and Akamai plan to give merchants a way to identify a legitimate AI agent, understand whether it is browsing or paying, and link its actions to an authenticated end-user. The partners also intend to give merchants added protection over how payment information flows through checkout systems.

Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol will sit between AI agents, merchants and Visa credentials. It will use standard web infrastructure so that agents can transmit information that shows they are approved for a specific shopping task, share data about the consumer on whose behalf they act, and transmit payment credentials through a merchant's existing checkout flow.

The protocol is designed to support a wide range of payment patterns, from network tokens to smaller "micropayment" transactions. Akamai will add what it describes as end-to-end protection for these flows. The company will validate agent authenticity and block suspected fraud or abuse before it reaches sensitive payment systems.

Through its edge network, Akamai will also bring real-time behavioural and network intelligence into the decision process. Its systems will analyse traffic patterns and interaction histories to detect anomalies and enhance risk scoring around each AI agent request.

Visa's protocol will connect each verified agent to the consumer it represents. Akamai will then maintain that link through its user recognition tools. The firms say this will preserve account context and risk posture as the interaction moves across different parts of a merchant's digital estate.

Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy at Akamai, said the shift towards AI-driven purchasing changes basic trust assumptions in eCommerce.

"The promise of agentic commerce hinges on recognition: the fundamental ability to trust an agent acting on someone's behalf," said Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy, Akamai Technologies. "By combining Visa Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai's deep user recognition and threat intelligence, we're working to solve the dual-identity challenge that's crucial to AI commerce. We prove both who the agent is and, critically, who it represents. This is what transforms AI agents from novelties into trusted economic actors."

Jack Forestell, Visa Chief Product & Strategy Officer, said that broad adoption of AI agents in commerce will depend on shared trust standards across the ecosystem.

"Agentic commerce is 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," said Jack Forestell, Visa Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Visa. "By collaborating with Akamai to deploy Trusted Agent Protocol, we're delivering the real-time intelligence merchants need to support AI-driven experiences without introducing new risk. This is how we help the industry move confidently into the next era of commerce."

The partnership addresses three main use cases for merchants. The first is clear identification of a legitimate AI agent and its purpose on the site. Trusted Agent Protocol will indicate whether an agent is in browsing mode or executing a payment. Akamai's telemetry will then strengthen that signal through network and behavioural analysis.

The second area is attribution of an agent's actions to a specific consumer. Visa's protocol will pass information that links each verified agent to the underlying user. Akamai will retain that identity through its edge-based recognition features, so that merchants can use consistent trust signals for fraud checks across multiple sessions.

The third focus is predictable handling of payments initiated by agents. Trusted Agent Protocol will define how an agent presents payment information in the way a merchant expects, regardless of the type of credential. Akamai's protection will monitor those interactions and intervene if it identifies suspicious patterns.

Visa said Trusted Agent Protocol is designed so that merchants can adopt it with minimal changes to their infrastructure and user experience. The company stated that the protocol can scale across its network of 175 million accepting merchant locations worldwide.

Akamai said nine of the world's ten largest retailers already use its services for digital commerce. Its role in the new partnership will extend that relationship into AI-mediated shopping journeys as merchants adjust their fraud controls for automated traffic.

Both companies expect agent-generated traffic in online retail and other sectors to rise as consumers adopt AI assistants and shopping bots. They plan to extend the Trusted Agent Protocol across Akamai's cloud so that merchants can manage that demand at global scale.