How Experian turned AI risk into a market opportunity

The ability of AI agents to evaluate options, make decisions, and act on behalf of consumers creates a powerful promise: more personalized, convenient, and intelligent shopping experiences. It also creates a new kind of risk. 

When an AI agent arrives at a merchant’s site, how does the business know the agent is real, authorized, and acting on behalf of the person it claims to represent? How does a bank know the transaction is legitimate? How does the ecosystem prevent fraud without making the customer experience harder? 

With deep assets in data, identity, and fraud prevention, Experian, a global data and technology company, was uniquely positioned to define a new layer of market infrastructure: one that could allow agentic commerce to scale safely. 

The challenge — Defining Experian’s role in a world where AI agents transact 

Experian could see that AI agents were going to start acting on behalf of consumers, but the commerce system had no reliable way to verify whether those agents were legitimate and authorized to act.  

Card networks could see their own cards. Merchants could see activity on their platforms. AI providers could see their own agents. Fraud tools could assess certain risks. But there was no complete view connecting the person, the agent, consent, payment credentials, and the transaction itself — leaving blind spots where legitimacy could be difficult to establish. 

Without a trusted way to bind a human to an AI agent, agentic commerce could break faster than it scaled due to fraud, disputes, unauthorized transactions, and consumer mistrust. 

That created two questions: What would need to exist for agentic commerce to work safely at scale? And what role should Experian play in this new agentic AI world?

The solution — Designing the trust layer agentic commerce needs to scale 

Experian pressure-tested where agentic AI could go and where the company had a right to win. One insight quickly sharpened the work: Commerce would likely be one of the first major use cases for AI agents, and payments would be where the promise either scaled or stalled. 

Experian brought critical assets to that problem: trusted data, identity verification capabilities, fraud prevention expertise, and credibility with the institutions that already underpin digital commerce. We helped connect those assets to the mechanics of the market: the payment flows, authorization gaps, fraud risks, ecosystem incentives, and adoption barriers that would determine whether the idea could move from concept to infrastructure.  

Product thinking and ecosystem thinking advanced together. The team framed the opportunity, talked through the proposition with leaders across banks, networks, merchants, AI companies, acquirers, and other market participants, shaped the go-to-market logic, and helped Experian engage the partners needed to give the framework reach.

The result? Experian Agent Trust, a first-of-its-kind framework designed to connect verified consumers, authorized AI agents, consent, payment credentials, and transaction context, extending Experian’s identity and fraud leadership into a new commercial era.

The impact — Positioning Experian to shape the next era of commerce 

Experian Agent Trust was launched in 2026 as part of a broader Know Your Agent coalition, with partners helping connect identity, payments, and network validation into a layered trust framework. Visa, Akamai, Skyfire, Fastly and Cloudflare were among the announced coalition partners, with additional ecosystem discussions underway.

That coalition approach is central to the success of Agent Trust. Given that agentic commerce is a two-sided market, trust in the system is key to it functioning. Consumers and their agents need places to transact. Merchants need confidence that accepting agent-led transactions will not increase fraud and disputes. Banks and networks need better signals to distinguish legitimate activity from risk. The value of Agent Trust grows as more participants connect to it. 

For Experian, the work elevated a powerful strategic possibility: Its identity and fraud capabilities could become foundational infrastructure for a new era of commerce, creating not just a feature or bolt-on capability, but an actual layer of trust.  

The implications extend beyond shopping. The same trust problem will emerge whenever an AI agent acts on behalf of a person: opening a financial account, moving money, managing subscriptions, accessing services, or making decisions that require authorization. Commerce may be the first proving ground, but it is unlikely to be the last.