Akamai and Visa Team on Agentic Commerce Controls

With at least one forecast, from Morgan Stanley, predicting agentic commerce could capture from 10% to 20% of U.S. e-commerce spending by 2030, payments companies are quickly prepping. The latest is the pairing of Visa Inc. and Akamai Technologies Inc., a cybersecurity and cloud-computing company.

The Visa and Akamai collaboration will see the integration of Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s behavioral intelligence, user recognition, and bot and abuse protection. This will enable them to offer merchants identity, authentication, and fraud controls needed to let them “welcome AI agents with commerce intent into their digital storefronts,” a Visa statement says.

Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol in October. It is meant to help merchants distinguish between trusted AI agents and bots with malicious intent. Google Inc. has a similar service, and PayPal Holdings Inc. is working with Google on agentic commerce, too.

Ensuring the identity of the AI agent is necessary to limit fraud and protect the transaction. “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,” Visa says. “Without this trust layer, merchants risk losing control of personalization, security, and the consumer relationship.”

Akamai, in its “2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report,” says bot traffic with AI capabilities surged 300% in the past year (July 2024 to July 2025). Akamai also says AI-driven bot traffic grew from practically nothing in 2024 to 0.27% of all traffic and 0.9% of known bot traffic across the Akamai platform this year. In a two-month period this year, Akamai says the commerce industry had more than 25 billion AI bot requests.

“The promise of agentic commerce hinges on recognition, the fundamental ability to trust an agent acting on someone’s behalf,” Patrick Sullivan, Akamai chief technology officer, security strategy, says in a statement.

A recent Global Payments Inc. report found that many merchants are hesitant about agentic commerce. Some 42% of businesses say they would be concerned if AI agents started buying from them on behalf of consumers, while 36% said no, and 22% said they were not sure. The primary reservations businesses have about agentic commerce are security, fraud prevention, and dispute resolution.