# Identity Infrastructure Fails to Secure AI Agents

> Source: <https://letsdatascience.com/news/identity-infrastructure-fails-to-secure-ai-agents-453edb97>
> Published: 2026-06-29 08:00:43+00:00

AI-agent-driven transactions have scaled far faster than identity infrastructure: by Black Friday 2025, AI-driven traffic to US retail sites rose 805% year-over-year, with agents driving over $22 billion in global online sales (Adobe data, cited by Socure CEO Johnny Ayers in PYMNTS). Ayers argues that agentic commerce requires a Know Your Agent (KYA) framework parallel to Know Your Customer, built on four capabilities: establishing agent identity, confirming permitted actions, maintaining accountability for every action taken, and continuously monitoring behavior against approved parameters. The global AI agents market is valued at $5.4 billion (2024) and projected to reach $236 billion by 2034 (Grand View Research). For practitioners, KYA maps to concrete engineering priorities: machine-identity lifecycle management, delegated authorization standards (OAuth 2.0, OIDC), tamper-evident logging, and real-time policy enforcement - areas where no interoperable standards yet exist at scale.
