Identity Infrastructure Fails to Secure AI Agents

AI-agent-driven transactions surged 805% year-over-year by Black Friday 2025, with agents driving over $22 billion in global online sales, but identity infrastructure has failed to keep pace. Socure CEO Johnny Ayers calls for a Know Your Agent (KYA) framework with four capabilities to secure agentic commerce, as the AI agents market is projected to grow from $5.4 billion in 2024 to $236 billion by 2034.

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.