KYA is the umbrella term for any system or process that enables trusted agentic behavior. An extension of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB), KYA aims to add trust to both B2C (agentic commerce) and B2B (enterprise agents) applications of AI.
The technology for KYA already exists, but organizations are still figuring out how to operationalize KYA principles across agentic commerce and enterprise use cases.
Organizations can apply KYA to secure any agentic AI use case, including agentic commerce and enterprise agent deployments.
KYA extends KYB and KYC by verifying the individuals and businesses involved in creating and deploying an agent. This is similar to how KYB extends KYC by verifying the individuals behind a business and the business’s details.
Payment protocols help agents communicate with payment systems and sit within the payment execution layer for agentic commerce. KYA is a framework for identifying agents and the humans or organizations behind them as part of the identity and trust layer. These concepts focus on different layers of the agentic AI ecosystem.
Many businesses building agentic experiences and infrastructure verify individuals and businesses during onboarding to stop bad actors or comply with anti-money laundering laws. Beyond onboarding, KYA processes can help build or add trust during payment execution, access requests, and when capturing a user’s intent.