The Agentic Angle: Digital Identity for AI Agents

Agentic AI is already starting to act on our behalf from booking appointments to online shopping, to managing personal finances. But as we delegate more of our online interactions to AI agents, this raises a crucial question: how do we know an agent is who it claims to be, and is authorised to act for an organisation or even for us? Could the answer lie in digital identity technology?

Join techUK on 22 October, alongside leading digital identity providers and AI innovators, to explore whether digital identity could provide the trust and verification agentic AI needs to act safely and accountably on our behalf. This webinar is part of techUK's new Agentic AI event series, building on our recently published industry brief on agentic AI and part of techUK's goal of driving further adoption of digital identity solutions.

As deployment of agentic AI begins to scale across businesses and society, ensuring a secure, verifiable, trusted and efficient digital experience is key to building increased confidence in users of this transformation technology. Getting this right now therefore matters. Without a trusted anchor binding agents to verified identities, the systems designed to help us could open new attack vectors in fraud, privacy and accountability at scale. Get it right, and the opportunity is significant: verified AI agents operating on our behalf could transform financial onboarding, streamline public services, enable continuous compliance, and make complex processes radically more accessible.

This session will explore how and where digital identity technologies and solutions could help. The understanding of Digital ID has evolved in recent years beyond simply logging into a service, with trust services such as e-signatures, business ID, item ID expanding what is possible through secure, user-empowered verification. In this session leaders from industry will discuss whether the same principles and frameworks that enable the provision of digital verification solutions that let a person prove who they are online - verified credentials, certified providers, data minimisation- could be applied to AI agents and as a result become the foundation of building trust and confidence in AI agentic solutions that could support the increased adoption.

In this session, we will explore:

Defining the challenge. When AI acts on our behalf or on behalf of an organisation, what specifically needs to be verified, and how do we distinguish delegated authority from impersonation when the “user” is no longer human?

Building the infrastructure. What does a trusted chain of delegation look like in practice, and which technical standards, verifiable credentials and certification frameworks does “Know Your Agent” (KYA) require to operate safely at scale?

Opportunity and adoption. Where does verified agentic AI unlock the greatest value, and what needs to happen across government, industry and regulators to get there?