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As autonomous AI agents increasingly browse, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, one challenge is becoming unavoidable for merchants: trust. On Wednesday, Akamai Technologies announced a strategic collaboration with Visa aimed at addressing that problem. The partnership integrates Visas Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamais behavioral intelligence, allowing merchants to authenticate AI agents, link them to real consumers, and block malicious bot traffic before it ever reaches sensitive systems. The move comes as agent-driven traffic floods the internet. According to Akamais 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic surged more than 300% over the past year, with the commerce industry alone seeing more than 25 billion AI bot requests in a two-month period. We all continue to be excited about the proliferation of agentic AI use cases, said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of security strategy at Akamai. Were seeing billions upon billions of requests coming from agentic AI use cases. When AI becomes the intermediary For decades, digital commerce has been built around a simple assumption: A human is on the other end of the transaction. Agentic commerce breaks that model. Instead of navigating a merchants site directly, consumers increasingly rely on software to search, compare, and sometimes buy on their behalf. For instance, whereas previously buying a new suitcase might involve exploring a dozen retailer’s sites, soon you might have AI do the legwork for you. That shift introduces a new intermediaryone that can be helpful, harmful, or fraudulent. Theres a new entity thats now sitting in between the merchant and the consumer, said Rubail Birwadker, Visas global head of growth. Things could go wrong. From a consumer standpoint, that raises questions about refunds, disputes, and chargebacks. Whose fault is it if you asked for a black bag and received a dark blue one by mistake? From a merchant perspective, it creates uncertainty around intent, legitimacy, and risk. If youre a merchant, and youre thinking about your website, there are a lot of changes coming your way, Sullivan said. You built your website originally in the era where there was going to be a human on the other end. Now, discovery may happen through an AI-powered chat interface. Browsing may be conducted by an autonomous agent. Even the browser itself may be software acting on behalf of a user. We need to make sure that its still on behalf of the right human and its not a fraudster taking advantage of some new evolution in technology, Sullivan said. Proving both the agent and the human At the center of the VisaAkamai partnership is a dual-identity problem: verifying not just who the human is, but who the agent acting for them is. Its important for us to always know who the human is, Sullivan said. But then, as we see these agentic use cases emerge, its important for us to get signal from Visa of who that agent is in that interaction. Visas Trusted Agent Protocol provides authentication signals indicating whether an agent is authorized and whether it intends to browse or pay. Akamai reads and reinforces those signals using behavioral intelligence, often before traffic reaches a merchants core systems. Youre going to see traffic before it ever reaches a merchant system, Sullivan said. That allows us to build a trusted user profile so we can understand that Jim is actually Jim. Because Akamai sees end users repeatedly across the internetshopping, banking, reading newsit can establish consistency and spot anomalies early in the transaction flow. That allows us to very, very early in the transaction reduce attempts at fraud and impersonation, Sullivan said. Scale changes the threat model The surge in AI-driven traffic has raised concerns about whether volume itself becomes a security risk. Sullivan argues scale cuts both ways. Weve seen AI bot traffic surge 300 plus percent this year, he said. But while the numbers are in the billions, thats still sort of a rounding error for the overall traffic that we see. Still, Sullivan expects automation to accelerate abuse over time. Anything that can be automated, its just so much more profitable for attackers, he said. If you can automate your attack, you can pull off more attacks. Thats why both companies emphasize operating at global scale. Visa processes transactions across nearly 200 markets, while Akamai manages traffic and bots at internet-wide levels. These are two companies that operate at massive scale, Sullivan said. Its companies like ours that we think will stand up to the pace of these automated processes. Why merchants matter most While consumers may benefit immediately from smoother discovery and purchasing, Birwadker said the heaviest lift lies with merchants adapting their infrastructure. A large amount of change really lies on the acceptance side, on the merchant side, Birwadker said. Their infrastructure needs to keep up with all the changes that are happening. Merchants will need to decide what information agents can access, how pricing and inventory are exposed, and how loyalty and personalization work when an AI, not a browser, is driving the interaction. This is just keeping up with changes to consumer behavior, Sullivan said. Theyre having an AI agent do something on their behalf. A compatibility play for the future Neither Visa nor Akamai claims to know exactly what agentic commerce will look like three years from now. But both frame Trusted Agent Protocol as a compatibility layerone that allows commerce infrastructure to evolve without losing control. Our goal is just to make sure that our ecosystem remains compatible with the agentic world, Birwadker said. Its more about compatibility than about almost anything else. As AI agents move from novelty to necessity, that trust layer may determine whether merchants embrace agentic commerceor shut it out altogether.
Category:
E-Commerce
The idea of the Queen Bee has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. Youve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone. It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just dont support each other. Maybe the problem isnt the system; maybe its . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely. A zero-sum world The term Queen Bee was coined by Graham Staines and his colleagues in a 1973 article in Psychology Today. The researchers observed a small number of senior women who appeared to distance themselves from other women in heavily male-dominated environments. Even in the original study, the behavior wasnt framed as spite. It was framed as adaptation. These women were navigating environments where there was room for exactly one of them to succeed. In a zero-sum world, survival strategies look a lot like coldness. In the 50 years since, the corporate world managed to turn a situational observation into a personality diagnosis. Yet the newest research makes one thing clear: the Queen Bee stereotype says very little about women, and a great deal about the cultures they are operating in. One of the striking pieces of recent evidence comes from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics. It examined what happens when women leaders distance themselves from other women. The surprising finding wasnt that distancing happens; it was who pays the price when it does. Female subordinates showed lower feelings of belonging, lower leadership ambition, and higher intentions to leave. Male subordinates, by contrast, were unaffected. In other words, when the culture pressures a woman leader to blend in with the dominant group, the cost is absorbed by the women below her. The researchers are clear: the distancing originates not from rivalry, but from discrimination. Women who experience bias early in their careers often learn that aligning with the dominant (often male) culture is the safest path forward. That alignment can look like toughness, or hyper-competence, or refusing to mentor junior women because theyve been taught that visibility is dangerous. It is armor, not malice. When identity becomes a liability A broader 2024 literature review goes further, arguing that the term Queen Bee has become so misapplied that it obscures more than it reveals. The recommended term is self-group distancing, which describes how members of any underrepresented group may behave when identity becomes a liability. The behavior is well documented among racial minorities, first-generation professionals, LGBTQ+ employeesanyone who feels they have something to lose by being too closely associated with their own group. It is not a woman problem. It is a scarcity problem. And the scarcity is real. When leaders tell me about a Queen Bee, I often ask a single question: How many women are in the room where decisions are made? The answer is almost always the same: one, or maybe two. In those environments, it is hardly surprising that some women feel pressure to prove they are different from the stereotype of women as emotional, inexperienced, or not leadership material. Distancing becomes a way to signal, I am not like them. It is not pretty, but it is predictable. What is rarely acknowledged is how differently these dynamics play out when women are no longer tokens. Studies of global organizations show that when women hold multiple senior roles, sponsorship of women increases, not decreases. In firms with women CEOs, the next generation of senior women is larger. Leadership pipelines are healthier. And the Queen Bee patterns that managers fear become almost nonexistent. Put simply: when women stop being the only one, the motivation to distance evaporates. ‘Too soft’ To understand how this works on the ground, consider the experience of a leader. Early in her career, she worked under a woman who had a reputation for being harsh. Colleagues whispered that she was a classic Queen Bee. My client recalls thinking the same, until she learned that this leader had repeatedly been told she was too soft and not decisive enough, feedback her male peers never received. She had built a leadership style around eliminating any sign that could be read as feminine. Her high standards werent meant to sabotage other women; they were meant to make sure no one questioned their competence. This is the part managers often misinterpret. Behaviors that look like ice can actually be fear. Behaviors that look like competitiveness can be self-protection. When conflict between women appears, people leap to the Queen Bee label. The story we tell changes the behavior we see. For managers who want a healthier culture, the task is not to root out Queen Bees. It is to remove the conditions that create them. That starts with representation. When there are enough women in senior roles, solidarity becomes easier than distance. But it also requires clearer evaluation systems, because vague criteria give stereotypes room to breathe. It requires rewarding sponsorship and collaboration, not just individual performance, because people invest in what gets recognized. And it requires noticing the small signals in daily life: who gets interrupted, who gets invited to meetings, whose mistakes are scrutinized. If you believe a senior woman is acting like a Queen Bee, the first question to ask is: What in this culture made distancing feel necessary? When leaders approach it this way, they stop treating womens behavior as a problem to fix and begin treating the culture as a system to redesign. The Queen Bee myth persists because it is simple. But workplaces are not simple, and people certainly are not. The truth is far less dramatic and far more useful: When the hive is hostile, bees protect themselves. When the hive is healthy, they support each other. That means the Queen Bee is not your warning sign about women. She is your warning sign about the workplace.
Category:
E-Commerce
The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacellesthose long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylonsextended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos. Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsensea prop master’s fever dream. But now the math has caught up to the dream. Harold “Sonny” Whitea mechanical engineer and applied physicist who worked on warp drive concepts at NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratoryhas published a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a new design for a warp drive that happens to look a lot like the Enterprise. White told the science and tech publication The Debrief that the resemblance to the twin nacelles of [Star Treks] USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic, but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.” In other words: When White and his research colleagues came up with a design that could bend spacetime but also keep a crew safe inside the ship, the optimal geometry that emerged was twin engine pods arranged around a central habitable zone. That’s the Enterprise. Perhaps it’s because there are only so many ways physics allows you to arrange exotic energy efficiently. Star Trek‘s production designers, working on pure intuition and ’60s aesthetics, accidentally landed on a rare optimal solution. It’s as if someone sketched the ideal car design in 1920 without knowing anything about aerodynamics, and a century later, physics said: “Actually, you were right.” The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation [Image: CBS/Getty Images] The warp drive According to White and his colleagues, the original mathematical model for a warp drive envisioned a spacecraft encased in a continuous, donut-shaped ring of negative energy, a bizarre form of matter that works like gravity in reverse, pushing space apart rather than pulling it together. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed this model in 1994 after watching Star Trek episodes and wondering if the science could actually work. This theoretical geometry could effectively move an object faster than light by deforming the space around it, but his idea came with headache-inducing problems for any engineer trying to build it. White’s breakthrough was simpler. Instead of trying to make Alcubierre’s donut-shaped design work, he asked a different question: What if you broke the energy ring into separate tubes, like engine pods, arranged around the ship? That small geometric shiftfrom one continuous ring to multiple discrete cylinderschanges everything about how the physics plays out inside the bubbles. The math suddenly became manageable. The interior could remain flat and safe. The dangerous forces could be confined to the nacelles, away from the crew. “The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries,” White explains. By organizing the exotic matter into these specific pods, engineers could theoretically maintain a completely flat, calm interior for the ship while the external geometry handles the violent warping of space. But this research doesn’t mean we are going to be kirking and spocking all the way to the Crab Nebula any time soon. Faster-than-light travel remains a theoreticalbut possibleway to travel across the cosmos that depends on many factors, like producing the fuel necessary to make it happen. If it ever happens, it will be generations away. White’s paper, however, provides a mathematical blueprint for practical design and engineering. Once built, his proposed design will result in something that looks like every nerds favorite spaceship. A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA] White’s math dictates that to keep the ship’s internal clock synchronized with the outside world and avoid ripping the pilot apart, the most efficient structure involves arranging these energy tubes around the craftexactly like the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise. A figure from Interior-flat cylindrical nacelle warp bubbles: derivation and comparison with Alcubierre model by White et al., 2025 [Image: White et al./CC-BY 4.0] “I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles basedon a nacelle-like topology,” White says, noting that the new geometry allows for structures that act as modular propulsion units rather than a single, unmanageable energy field. The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Original Series. [Image: CBS/Getty Images] Humanitys hallucinations This phenomenon of fiction functioning as a crystal ball/R&D lab for reality has pervaded civilizations progress since Jules Vernes predictions of moon trips and nuclear submarines. Take Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, who found himself staring at the screen during the pandemic, watching The Expanse, a series that imagines a realistic scenario for humanity spread throughout our solar system. “They have these huge structures in space, and it got me thinking . . . we are not gonna get there the way we are doing things now,” McClelland told me in a interview from 2023. That sci-fi binge-watch led to Evolved Structures, a project where McClelland uses generative AI to hallucinate spacecraft parts that look unnervingly organicas if they were extracted from an extraterrestrial ship secretly stored in an Area 51 hangar. The AI, unburdened by human preconceptions of what a bracket should look like, designs twisted, bone-like metal forms that are a third lighter than human designs but just as strong. McClelland believes it is the only way that we can mass manufacture the future of space colonization. The translation from page to pad is often even more direct. NASA engineer Les Johnson became obsessed with the idea of laser sails after reading the novel The Mote in Gods Eye written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in 1974, which describes a sail that uses photons as a thrust force to move a spaceship over vast distances at extremely high speeds. It made him become an engineer. I had an opportunity to get involved in a project that was looking at different types of propulsion, and this is one that I added to the mix to consider, he told me during an interview for a story on how he and his team designed the largest solar sail ever created. Now the technology is herewe can build these things. And thats been on again, off again part of what Ive worked on for the last 20 years. [Photo: CBS/Getty Images] The list of fictional technologies that are now mundane reality is so long that it is actually exhausting. Sometimes they take a handful of years to become real. Other times decades pass between the dream and the device. In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published a technical paper proposing geostationary satellites to relay communications; 19 years later, NASAs Syncom 3 broadcast the Tokyo Olympics to the U.S., fulfilling the prophecy. Clarke was also to theorize solar sails in his 1964 story “Sunjammer.” Way earlier, in 1933, H.G. Wells imagined video calls on glass screens in The Shape of Things to Come; it took 87 years until the Zoom era made us sick of them. A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA] It’s not the first time this has happened with Star Trek. Saying that the series shaped humanity as we know it today is not an exaggeration. It introduced ideas that, many decades later, resulted in designs and technologies that have moved humanity forward. Not just automatic doors, but mobile phones, touchscreen tablets and interfaces, voice-activated AI assistants, medical scanning devices, and virtual reality. Star Trek didn’t just predict the futureit became the blueprint engineers actually followed to design it. Clearly, theres a pattern here of dreaming up the impossible, putting it on a screen or in a book to entertain ourselves, and then, slowly but surely, our math and our machines evolve until they catch up to the fantasy. It feels like we are not just observing the universe; we are designing it to match the stories we tell ourselves, proving that the most powerful force in physics might just be a good writer’s deadline. Some scientists think we all may be part of a cosmic simulation in some alien computer. Perhaps we are all giant AI, like in Asimovs short story “The Last Question.” Whatever the case is, the fact is that humanity seems to have a peculiar knack for reverse-engineering its own hallucinations.
Category:
E-Commerce
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