DataDome CEO Benjamin Fabre on How AI Agents Are Reshaping E-Commerce

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong AI Leadership Insights series. I'm your host, Mike Baard. Today we're with Benjamin Fabre, who's CEO for data Do and we're gonna be talking about, well, how AI agents are gonna be used to buy stuff, but it may be more challenging than we think.

Benjamin, welcome to the show. Thank you. Welcome.

So what is the issue here? I mean, I, everybody's kind of at least aware of AI agents, and they probably thought about how I might use these things to go buy something, but it may be a little bit more challenging than we thought because, well, the e-commerce side of the house has to recognize that AI agent as something that I want to have it do something positive for me, right? Yeah, exactly.

So, um, you know, in in the past the, the usual way to tackle fraud, uh, was to detect, um, if the incoming traffic was coming from human or from parts. Uh, so it was kind of a binary vision of the internet. Uh, but now with this massive revolution of, uh, agency traffic, we see that, um, legitimate users are using AI agent in order to purchase or browse website, look at the inventory, and then make some purchase.

So the binary decision that in the past were solved with capture, for instance, uh, is not the right solution anymore. We have to detect what's the intent of the session, uh, regardless of the fact that it's a real human with a, a mouse and scrolling on a website, or if it's an agent working on the behalf or of a human. So how do I recognize that?

Because to your point, it is another type of non-human identity, but there are other types of non-human identity. So how do I know which one of these is the right ones? What we, uh, do at Data Damm is that we, uh, first do some finger printing in order to identify and, uh, authenticate, uh, very, um, sexual matter, uh, what's the AI agent, uh, to make sure that we are properly identifying, uh, the right agent that is browsing the website.

But then that's, that's not enough. Then we have to go down and deeper in order to understand what's the intent behind every single session, because the very same agent, uh, can at the very same time, uh, pro the website or the API, in order to, um, do a legitimate action like looking at product, finding the right one, and then make a payment. But at the very same time, an agent can be used in order to, uh, do some scraping, uh, so like price monitoring or can be used in order to do scalping.

So they might try to buy the limited inventory to generate profits on that. Uh, so the intent based detection is key. Uh, and how can we do that?

Uh, it's to be plugged to the business KPIs of the retailers. So the detection engine, um, that could to detect the, the wrong intent, uh, have to understand what is the right, uh, usage of the, the service, uh, and what is the wrong one, um, in order to understand what will be positive on the business and what will hurt the business. Do we also have to be concerned about fraud here?

Because I can imagine that either somebody's gonna try to hijack my AI agent, or they'll create one that looks like me and starts doing stuff and charging my credit card for my trouble. Yeah, you are definitely right. Uh, as we speak, the new standard, uh, are being defined by all the leading, um, LMS and agency companies, uh, and the pro prevention solution like data them.

Uh, we are working very closely with all those, um, uh, agent companies in order to create new protocol, the new authentication systems, uh, and to make sure that it's not, uh, spoof able, or at least that we have the right level of signals in order to detect, uh, what is a legitimate, uh, uh, agent and what is an attempt to spoof, uh, a user or to do an contact cover through, uh, agent in traffic. So that's a whole new area, uh, where having the behavioral detection is, is key, and being real time is also key. And won't I wanna, as a retailer, recognize certain AI agents as maybe best customer AI agents, or will I not assign levels of privileges and services access to them based on, uh, you know, how much activity I've seen from them in the past, but I have to be able to track that, right?

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think the, one of the main, uh, concern that we are seeing for retailers now is that they lack visibility first. Um, you know, they've worked very hard over the past 20 years to have a clear visibility of their traffic, of their conversion rate, the sessions, et cetera.

Uh, and they have entire department working on analytics, understanding what is coming from SEO, what is coming from ads or SEM, uh, and now they see that the traffic coming from all those source of traffic is decreasing. Uh, and there is this increase, uh, with AI agent and lms, uh, according to Gartner, in the coming two years, it's gonna be at least 20% of the traffic that will be agent traffic. So it's gonna be massive, and I personally think that it can be even higher than that.

So having good visibility on this agent traffic on the different source of acquisition is key, and that's what we provide to our customers. And then it's good to view that, to understand that, but it's also great to be able to act on that and to block the fraud before it happen. There's also some subtlety in the sense that I may be engaging with an AI agent and it keeps coming back, but it doesn't buy anything because maybe what's happening is, is that AI agent is engaging with multiple retailers and it winds up buying something somewhere else, but don't I wanna know that behavior?

Yeah, exactly. Uh, so when we plug the, the, the behavioral detection on the business, KPI, so like, is the session, uh, about purchase or not, uh, can we see a transaction, uh, with this user agent on this AI agent? That's how we can qualify and identify what are the genuine, uh, AI agents that's have the right conversion rate and the right, uh, way to consume the website, and what are the one that are just here to browse, potentially just do some price scraping, uh, but not purchase.

And that's what you don't want to allow on your website, uh, because that may, uh, impact, uh, your competitive advantage with, uh, other retailers, for instance. So yeah, that's definitely key for our customers. I'm gonna assume that the retailers are also creating their own AI agents.

So will the AI agent on behalf of the buyer negotiate with the AI agent that the seller creates and is, and how will they negotiate with each other? Yeah, that's, that's good. That, that's very fun.

Uh, we have most of our customers, uh, as we speak, are creating MMCP, uh, so the new protocol in order to make their, um, their services available to AI agents and those MCP can start to include in that some AI agent itself, uh, to create some negotiation, as you said, to engage with loyalty program. So there are a lot of great and, and exciting stuff that are coming, but as usual, every time there is a new service, a new way to purchase that will introduce new fraud. So we have to keep investing and make sure that as the retailers are doing a lot of innovation, which is really game changer, at the same time, we keep improving the security and all the fraud, so we stay ahead of attackers.

Will it be hard to maintain something that looks like a consistent list price on things? Because, um, today I, as a human, I'm kind of lazy, so I just go to the website and I see that the prices and I click on it and I want to be done, but the AI agent is infinitely patient, so maybe they'll just go out and kind of bang on all these sites and keep looking for better and better deals, which the retailers will then respond to. I mean, what level of competition are we talking about here?

Yeah, you're right. That's gonna be probably very intense on, on, on the price. I think the, the, the price competition will be even more important than it was in the past, because the ability of users to compare pricing will significantly be higher.

Uh, so the, the pressure on the pricing might be something that is gonna be even more important than in the past, for sure. So what's your best advice to retailers to get ready for this brave new world? Because I mean, it seems like there's a lot of moving parts and pieces, but where do you get started?

So I think first, um, using a solution to have the right visibility, uh, on your traffic acquisition, uh, on all the LMS traffic that are either trying to create the foundational model with your data, uh, and understanding all the AI agent, uh, using your website, not just at the high level of the each agent itself, but going deep into each sessions to understand what will consume, what won't consume on your website. I think that's the number one priority. And, and offering this visibility to our customers was game changer.

And the second one is plugging the solutions to business KPIs. Uh, so we can qualify the different sessions, but what are the, the, the AI agent traffic that are making some, uh, purchase on the website? And what are the AI agent that are just consuming your resources?

Because that can be also very costly. Every single request on your product list, on your search engine, uh, on your checkout, uh, are costly. Uh, and you wanted to reserve your resources to the, uh, genuine users, uh, either, uh, human or AI agent.

How fast is all this happening then? I mean, you know, is this like, am I gonna wake up tomorrow and this is the new way of shopping, or is it gonna take us a couple of years? Um, so it's going very fast, and I think there is this pressure on, you know, the, the first mover.

Uh, so every retailer now as we speak, uh, is working on making sure that the, the, they are in the race, uh, they offer MCP, uh, uh, to their users, and they implement the right level of security and fraud prevention on this new way to consume on their website. So I think it's a matter of weeks and month, uh, to have the first early adopters. Uh, and I, I really definitely believe that in 2026, the significant parts of the revenue of the largest retailer will come from AI agents.

And we're talking about this in the context of say, B2C and mainly, but won't the retailers also use AI agents to buy stuff from wholesalers and manufacturers themselves and, and will those AI agents need to keep track of what the AI agents that are selling to consumers are doing? I mean, how complicated can it get? Yeah, the entire supply chain, uh, will be impacted.

It is not just for the public facing, um, uh, way to consume, but, uh, I think we will see that as a chain effect. Um, and, um, and, and at every layer of this chain, uh, we will have to introduce security, uh, to make sure that there are no abuse and no fraud, uh, because, you know, frauds are fast, frauds are clever, and they have a lot of money, uh, to try and find any weaknesses in those infrastructures. Now, depending on the brand, but most of the time retail is a razor thin profit margin game.

So, um, will they be able to make more money in this model with AI agents, or is it just gonna get tougher? Well, there are a lot of, uh, questions, uh, that are raising on their business model. I think one of the core step that we are working on also is to help, um, the retailers and the medias to secure their revenue, uh, because for instance, ads, what about ads?

If you are on your retail website, you have some ads, but this is an AI agent, um, no one will actually see the, the ads. So the impact on the revenue on your ads might be, uh, also significant. Uh, so we, uh, there are a few interesting initiatives that we are partnering with, uh, to create a monetization on all this, uh, AI agent traffic.

Um, and that's going to potentially be replacement or at least, uh, of part of it, uh, of the ads that, uh, the ads revenue that our customers are generating. Usually, To your point, retailers also spend an inordinate amount of time on things like SEO to try to make sure that they show up high on a search. But if we're not using search anymore and we're just using an AI agent, then how do I know that I, how do I get my site or offerings high up on the minds of that AI agent, assuming it has a mind, but you know what I mean?

Yep. Uh, yeah, indeed. So you have to, um, um, first understand how the different ai, uh, and LLM companies are p prosing your website.

Make sure that it is available properly, and they can use that. And there are, you know, the two part of the, the AI agent, the one that is the, the pri the scraping in order to create the foundational models. Uh, so you wanna make sure that you provide the right, not too much, not too few data, uh, to all the ai, um, to make sure that you are part of the foundational models.

And then there is the on the fly, um, scraping. Uh, and you also wanna make sure that, um, you share the right level of information, not too much, not too few. Uh, on, on, on this second part of the, the, the scraping of AI agents, um, and depending on your strategy, um, if you are a retailer, a marketplace, um, media, we help our customers to define the right, um, policy on all the this AI traffic.

Uh, because you might have different strategy depending on your business model, What is that one thing that we're kinda underestimating and not paying enough attention to right now? I would say making sure, you know, it's making sure that you implement the right security. You know, our customers, they want to innovate fast.

They wanna make sure that they don't miss the train of this agent traffic, but at the same time, you have to, uh, uh, put in place the core foundations of your security on all these new, uh, AI agents traffic. So, uh, I think, uh, you shouldn't, uh, underinvest too much into, uh, the security, uh, as you are moving fast. Right?

Folks, you heard in here, Hey, we've been fighting the fight trying to figure out which bots are good and which ones are bad for a long time now. But AI agents are essentially a new type of bot, and there's gonna be a lot more of 'em, and a lot more of 'em are hopefully good. The question is, is distinguishing which ones are what.

Hey, Benjamin, thanks for being on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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