Experian announces Agent Trust to power trusted AI-driven commerce

Experian has announced Experian Agent Trust™, a first-of-its-kind framework that establishes a secure, verifiable link between consumers and AI agents – bringing identity and accountability to AI-driven transactions.

As AI agents begin to search and transact autonomously, they introduce a fundamental challenge for businesses: how to trust an action when it is no longer driven by a human. Without a verified connection between humans and AI agents, autonomous commerce introduces new risks in fraud, misrepresentation and unauthorised transactions.

Experian Agent Trust addresses this challenge through a new Know Your Agent (KYA) framework, extending identity verification into the age of artificial intelligence. The framework ensures agent-initiated transactions are grounded in verified consumer identity.

“Agentic commerce will not scale without trust,” says Kathleen Peters, chief innovation officer at Experian. “What’s required is verifying the agent, the human behind it and their intent to purchase. This is a natural extension of Experian’s verification role in the ecosystem. We already help define trust in financial transactions; now we’re bringing that same leadership to agentic commerce.”

Experian Agent Trust is being developed within a growing ecosystem of collaborative agentic commerce contributors including Visa, Cloudflare and Skyfire, which are leading the development of secure and scalable AI-driven commerce across payments, networks and digital interactions.

Trust stack for agentic commerce

Within this ecosystem, Experian’s identity capabilities is designed to complement Visa Intelligent Commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol to support a layered framework for trust and secure agentic payments:

• Experian Human to Agent Binding connects verified consumers, devices and AI agents, issuing a real time trust token that validates identity and transaction risk.
• Trusted Agent Protocol allows merchants to identify and verify AI agents through Visa’s trusted network to help confirm an agent’s legitimacy and authorisation to act on behalf of a consumer.
• Cloudflare enforces this trust layer at the network edge, where it already powers and protects approximately 20% of the world’s Internet traffic, and operates the next-generation AI stack to build, secure and scale agents.
• Visa Intelligent Commerce enables secure AI commerce transactions, using network tokenisation.
• Skyfire offers an open, standardised way to package and exchange agent-related information across platforms, enabling interoperability and complementing existing identity and payment systems.

“Visa has spent decades earning trust across global commerce, which matters even more as AI becomes part of how transactions happen,” says Rubail Birwadker, senior vice-president and head of Growth Products and Partnerships at Visa. “As the ecosystem evolves and approaches like Experian’s human-to-agent identity binding capabilities emerge, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol are designed to provide the secure foundation for agentic commerce experiences at global scale.”

Comments Amir Sarhangi, CEO and co-founder of Skyfire, “Agentic commerce only works if merchants can confidently understand who they are transacting with, and if agents can pay as reliably as people do. Through our collaboration with Experian’s Agent Trust ecosystem and our work on the KYAPay protocol, we’re helping enable a seamless, interoperable trust layer that brings together identity and payments to unlock the full potential of autonomous transactions.”

Experian Agent Trust is designed to work with existing payment systems and frameworks, like Trusted Agent Protocol. At the centre of the framework is Human to Agent Binding, which creates a secure, persistent link between verified individuals, their devices and the AI agents. This enables a continuous, auditable history between who the user is and how the agent behaves over time.

A consumer may ask their AI agent to find the best noise-cancelling headset for an upcoming trip. The agent can evaluate products based on the consumer’s preferences and make a recommendation, for example, a Bose headphone, and prepare the transaction for approval. Once the consumer authorises the purchase, Human to Agent Binding helps confirm the agent is acting on behalf of a verified individual.

Experian issues an Agent Trust Token that validates identity and transaction fraud risk in real time. Together with the Experian Agent Registry, the system maintains dynamic trust scoring for AI agents based on behaviour and other risk signals.

Built for an open ecosystem

Experian Agent Trust services are platform-agnostic and built to scale with the evolving agent ecosystem.

By establishing a trusted connection between humans and AI agents, Experian is helping define the foundation for secure, scalable agentic commerce. These capabilities extend Experian’s leadership in identity verification and fraud prevention, where its solutions help clients avoid an estimated $15 billion–$19 billion in fraud losses annually.