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As payments companies, merchants, and consumers prepare for the growing use of artificial-intelligence agents in commerce, vendors, too, are getting ready for these independent, digital agents. Among the latest is Experian plc, best known as a credit-reporting agency, with its new Experian Agent Trust service and Kite AI with its Kite Agent Passport utility.
Experian says its agent trust service will help secure a verifiable link between consumers and AI agents, which would help bring identity and accountability to AI-enabled transactions.
Experian says the service will use a know your agent framework to ensure agent-initiated transactions are tethered to a verified consumer identity. This should contribute to increasing the trustworthiness of AI transactions, it says. “Agentic commerce will not scale without trust,” Kathleen Peters, Experian chief innovation officer, says in a statement. “What’s required is verifying the agent, the human behind it, and their intent to purchase.”
Developed with similar initiatives in mind, such as Visa Intelligent Commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol, Experian Agent Trust will complement other Experian services like issuing a real-time trust token that validates identity and transaction risk.
In related news, San Francisco-based Kite released its Kite Agent Passport, an identity and payment utility built from autonomous AI agents.
The Passport gives an AI agent a programmable, secure wallet to hold funds and make purchases on behalf of their users, while users maintain control over spending limits and authorized purchase destinations.
In an example, Kite says a user can purchase a physical product, have it shipped, and let the agent handle the payments, all within Claude, an AI engine, with spending limits controlled by the Passport.
Kite says other components of its service are a settlement layer and what it calls the Agent Interface & Experience. The latter enables agents and developers to interact with the system via agent registration, agent harnesses, and service discovery. The agent harness serves as a translator or connector between the raw performance of the AI models and the real-world applications in a business environment, as defined by Salesforce. Service discovery is the process of identifying, cataloging, and managing AI tools, agents, and applications.
Kite says test integrations are underway with PayPal Holdings Inc. and Shopify Inc.
