Fastly joins Experian to secure autonomous commerce at the edge

The shift toward agentic commerce moves transaction logic from the application layer to the network edge, where Fastly can now enforce identity-based access policies for non-human users. For the streaming industry, this infrastructure is critical as AI agents increasingly handle automated content licensing, ad-buying, and cross-platform service subscriptions. By validating the 'Human to Agent Binding' at the edge, providers can reduce fraud while capturing revenue from high-frequency, automated traffic that legacy security rules often block. High-volume streaming platforms should track whether this integration improves conversion rates for bot-initiated transactions without increasing latency.

The partnership follows a period of rapid growth in automated web traffic. According to Fastly network data from early 2026, AI-driven requests grew 30% between January and May, expanding at 6.5 times the rate of human-initiated traffic. This surge reflects a broader market shift where Salesforce reported AI agents influenced $262 billion in holiday sales during 2025. As machines become a dominant class of consumer, infrastructure providers are pivoting security stacks to treat bots as legitimate commercial entities rather than default security threats.

Experian originally launched the Agent Trust framework in April 2026, bringing together a consortium of industry leaders including Visa, Cloudflare, and Skyfire. Per Experian’s April 2026 announcement, the ecosystem centers on a 'Know Your Agent' (KYA) approach that issues real-time trust tokens to validate identity, consent, and transaction risk. Akamai joined the ecosystem in May 2026, signaling a competitive race among major CDN providers to own the 'trust layer' for autonomous commerce. For Fastly, this move is part of a broader strategy to diversify revenue beyond commoditized content delivery into high-value security services, particularly as the company reported its first profitable fiscal year in 2025 with $19.7 million in net income (per Network World, February 2026). AWS restricts internal EC2 access as infrastructure providers grapple with the surge in automated compute demand.