The Trust Gap Holding Agentic Commerce Back

Artificial intelligence agents can search, compare and prepare purchases on a consumer’s behalf. Completing the transaction is where the infrastructure breaks down.

Experian is moving to fix that. In April, the company announced Agent Trust, a framework that creates a verified link between consumers, their devices and the AI agents acting on their behalf. Visa, Cloudflare and Skyfire are part of the ecosystem.

Skyfire CEO Amir Sarhangi told PYMNTS that the identity gap is what the industry needs to solve first.

“Identity and trust are what we care the most about because at the end of the day, that’s the trust layer that needs to be created between the human, agent and the merchant,” he said.

How the Stack Works

The framework is built around a single problem. The internet was designed for humans, and its security infrastructure treats every non-human as a threat.

At the center of Experian Agent Trust is Human-to-Agent Binding, a persistent, verifiable connection between a verified consumer, their device and their AI agent. Experian issues an Agent Trust Token for each interaction, validating identity and transaction fraud risk in real time. An Agent Registry runs alongside it, maintaining a dynamic trust score for each agent based on behavioral signals and transaction history over time.

That token travels with the agent. When it reaches the network edge, Cloudflare, which handles roughly 20% of global internet traffic, can inspect the credential and decide whether to grant access. Skyfire, on the other hand, offers what it describes as an open, standardized way to package and exchange agent identity information across platforms, alongside a payment token that works within existing checkout flows.

Sarhangi described Skyfire’s role as interoperable.

“We’re not trying to compete with UCP, ACP,” he said. “We’re just talking about the identity layer and how a payment is made.”

The Stakes

The gap between what agents can do and what they are allowed to complete is costing merchants real transactions. The infrastructure to close it is being assembled in pieces, by competing players, with no agreed finish line in sight.

The stakes go beyond individual transactions. Agentic commerce demands approval precision, and network-level trust signals that existing infrastructure was not built to deliver. Tokenization, behavioral context and real-time identity signals are becoming the baseline for any system that wants to function at machine speed.

According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Agents of Change: How Agentic AI Is Redefining Commerce,” the agentic commerce market is projected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2030, but nearly half of consumers still cite fraud and identity concerns.

Despite willingness to let AI complete purchases on their behalf, most consumers still harbor concerns about agentic AI controlling commerce, citing fraud from rogue agents, lack of data transparency and difficulty reversing unwanted purchases, the report showed. Just 5% of consumers worldwide reported having no concerns about agentic commerce at all.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Where Payment Decisions Happen: How Issuer Data Is Powering the Next Era of Commerce” showed that issuer false declines contribute to roughly $430 billion in annual lost sales globally. That figure compounds the agentic commerce problem, as a blocked transaction may never surface to the consumer at all.

The frameworks being assembled today will determine which players are positioned to handle that volume when it arrives.

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