16% companies already issuing AI agent certificates: HID

Around a third of organizations (35 percent) rank AI agent certificates among the top three emerging trends in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), according to a new survey by identity security company HID.

AI agents are already being integrated into enterprise workflows, but companies are still debating whether they can be trusted. A solution is to create a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) digital certificate specifically for AI agents, giving each agent a verifiable digital identity that can help secure communication and ensure data integrity, says HID.

Its study has shown that 16 percent of enterprises are already issuing certificates for AI agents. The U.S. leads in adoption (18 percent) compared to Europe (13 percent), but only by a thin margin. Large organizations are currently leading the way in adopting PKI for AI agents, according to HID’s “Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in the Age of AI and Automation” market study.​

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of trust in the age of AI. As agent adoption grows, so too will the need to secure customer interactions and even bot- to-bot exchanges,” the report notes.

The research is based on a survey of 300 IT leaders in the U.S. and Europe. It explores emerging PKI challenges across AI, automation, and post-quantum computing.

PKI is a comprehensive security framework, comprising hardware, software, policies, and procedures, designed to create, manage, distribute, and revoke digital certificates and public-private key pairs. The study frames AI agents as the newest identity category, following the Internet of Things (IoT), when organizations began using PKI to secure communications between connected devices.

HID notes that standards for AI agents are still emerging, but the PKI community is continuing to refine frameworks. A promising approach comes from the Agent Name Service (ANS), a proposed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard (draft-narajala-ans), according to the firm.

The company offers PKI-as-a-service (PKIaaS), which it says simplifies certificate management across complex environments.

Other companies are also building their AI agent offerings, including Ping Identity, Saviynt, Dock Labs  and more. IBM, Auth0, and Yubico have recently formed a partnership to create a solution that verifies a high‑risk action was approved by a human.

Article Topics

AI agents  |  digital identity  |  digital trust  |  HID  |  PKI  |  research report  |  standards