It’s getting harder to tell the agents apart from the humans. For cybersecurity companies, identifying a digital agent crawling a website used to be enough evidence of malicious activity. Now, digital agents are representing human users and making purchases online, prompting sellers to reconfigure their businesses to better serve agents that read descriptions of products rather than look at photos to decide what to buy.
Companies like Israel-based CHEQ — which serves customers such as Dell, Heineken, and the University of Virginia — have developed platforms attempting to solve these problems for companies, CEO Guy Tytunovich told Semafor. CHEQ’s platform can figure out whether a visitor is a bot or agent and identify what their intent is by looking at data like how they click through the website and from what device. Then, brands can cater the website experience to them in real time. (Humans see colors, buttons, and product photos, while agents see large blocks of text or are able to ask the company’s own agents for specific information via chat.)
Agents are expected to handle up to $5 trillion in retail transactions by 2030, and companies that aren’t able to figure out the difference between agents and humans could miss out on sales and expose themselves to cybersecurity risks.