To usher in the era of agentic commerce, payments players, tech companies and other participants have to agree on safeguards. That is no easy task.

Accomplishing that is a significant part of FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar’s job. With members ranging from Visa and PayPal Holdings to Apple and Meta Platforms, not to mention JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, the alliance would seem to have collected the right voices for creating collaboration.

The FIDO Alliance brings together those members and others regularly to seek standards for identity technologies that help verify people are who they say they are for the purposes of commerce, and other forms of interaction in the electronic world. 

Still, Shikiar doesn’t see agentic commerce happening at scale for years. The linchpin will be establishing trust for merchants and consumers that agentic transactions will happen in the ways they’re expected to, without significant fraud incursions.

After attending the Global Digital Collaboration Conference in Geneva this month, he discussed how industry collaboration is coming along and progress toward allowing artificial intelligence bots to make purchases.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PAYMENTS DIVE: How does FIDO Alliance see its role in the fight against fraud, especially in the age of artificial intelligence?

ANDREW SHIKIAR: FIDO Alliance is an industry body focused on better user authentication, stronger user authentication, which addresses a lot of the threats that we see out in the market today. In the age of AI, you see a lot of attacks on people's credentials. You see deep fakes. You see fraudulent identities being set up. Fraudulent accounts being set up. So, it's really imperative that we find a way to tie all these things back to verified human identity… We need trust in the internet, and trust right now is under attack, as we all are aware. How can I trust that you're you? 

How important is payments data to the fight against that fraud and verifying identities?

We need to put things in place that reestablish trust in everything we do in our economy. Data, I would say, is a way of establishing trust, right? So, data points are signals. So as we look at things generally, when it comes to sign-ins and authentication, you have a series of signals that tell the service provider how confident they should be in a transaction, whether that's a sign-in, whether that is an actual purchase, or anything else, you need to have confidence that that person is who they say they are. And so, data to me is a data point and a signal that should give a service provider confidence in whatever they're doing. 

How does evolving AI play into fraud detection and fraud prevention in payments?

It becomes even more critical to be able to have data, not just about the agent, but tying it back to the individual behind that agent. Now, that's kind of where we're focused. 

On top of that, there’s a lot of activity around know-your-agent, and what are the agent breadcrumbs: Where has the agent been? What other transactions has it had? What other services has it taken part in? I think these are all parts of the KYA space, which is not our [FIDO] space, but a very important space for merchants and service providers to consider as they contemplate how to tackle agentic commerce, which is, of course, a massive opportunity, but I don't think is going to be realized until we can figure out how to establish this trust layer in the agentic commerce space.

How do you now help merchants accept bots when you’ve been trying to keep them out in the past?

That's part of our challenge is doing that. So what we've done is actually set up a couple work areas to tackle exactly this problem…we're looking at agentic authentication, we're focused on tying things back to the human behind it, but also making sure that agents that are signing in do so in an unphishable, passwordless way. So, using a passkey-like mechanism, not necessarily a passkey, but using an unphishable means of sign-in…this is work under development right now by FIDO alliance to allow for more secure agentic sign-ins for agents that have been authorized by human beings.  

What’s your take on the likelihood of payments happening with bots anytime soon?

[The consulting firm] McKinsey says agentic commerce is going to be a $3 trillion market by 2030 – that's a staggering number. I don't think we're there yet…Until trust is established, we'll see a very, very gradual move to enable agented commerce…It's difficult for merchants to have trust in the system, but just as importantly, for the legacy payments and trust infrastructure to have trust in agents. How do you think about things like chargebacks and liability? What if my agent goes rogue? …Until those issues are tackled, I don't think we'll see this take off at scale.