What Know-Your-Agent (KYA) Means for a B2B Supplier on SAP

Know-your-agent (KYA) is the practice of verifying, before a transaction is accepted, which AI agent is acting, who is accountable for it, and what it has been authorized to do. For a B2B supplier running SAP, it means an agent-originated order must trace to a known business partner, a named operator, and an explicit mandate before a sales order is created — and that check has to live in your own order intake, because no card network performs it for a net-30 purchase order.

Why KYA is in the news this month

On September 9, Ant International, Mastercard and Visa announced a collaboration on a know-your-agent interoperability framework, per their joint press release. Each already runs its own scheme — Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, Ant's Agentic Mobile Protocol — and the goal is common principles so an agent's identity is recognized across networks instead of re-verified by each. The release names three pillars: operator traceability (each agent linked to a validated operator, cardholder or business), shared security and behavioral certification, and continuous monitoring.

The motive is trust. Mastercard's Sherri Haymond told American Banker on September 17 that agentic commerce "will only scale at the speed of trust"; the same article cites Visa research finding only 23% of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to handle payments for them.

The analogy is know-your-customer: who is this, who stands behind them, does their behavior match what they said. KYA asks the same three questions of software, on a shorter clock — the release projects AI agents orchestrating US$3 trillion to $5 trillion of consumer commerce by 2030.

Why the card networks will not solve this for you

The KYA framework is being built where the networks sit: consumer checkout, at the point of payment. That is the right place for a $200 online purchase. It is not where a mid-market distributor accepts a $40,000 order against contract pricing on net-30 terms. Those orders arrive by EDI, email, portal, or a customer's buying agent calling your API, and they clear against credit limits, price agreements and ATP inside SAP — not a card network. The identity check has to be yours, at the one place every agent-originated order already passes through: the path from inbound order to sales-order creation.

What KYA looks like in an SAP order-to-cash flow

Map the three questions to SAP objects and the design gets concrete.

Which agent is acting? The agent presents a verifiable identity — under Google's AP2, now stewarded by the FIDO Alliance, a signed Intent or Cart mandate; under A2A, its Agent Card — and you record it as a distinct partner function on the order, not an anonymous "web order." An agent you cannot name is an agent you cannot revoke.

Who is accountable for it? The agent maps to an existing business partner (a sold-to in ECC, a BP in S/4HANA), a named human contact, and the contract it buys under. It is an extension of that customer's purchasing authority, not a new customer. If you find yourself creating a sold-to called "Acme AI Agent," stop.

What is it allowed to do? The mandate scope — materials, ship-tos, quantity and value ceilings, price agreement — is checked deterministically before creation, outside the model: BAPI_SALESORDER_SIMULATE first, then BAPI_SALESORDER_CREATEFROMDAT2 only if the simulated order falls inside both the mandate and the credit check. Usio CEO Louis Hoch put it plainly to American Banker: knowing an agent is legitimate is a start, but you still need to know it is doing what the customer asked. Identity is the partner function; authorization is the simulate step.

Is it still behaving? A per-agent baseline (order velocity, average value, ship-to spread) with an anomaly flag and a kill switch. Hoch's other recommendation — record what the customer asked for, what the agent was allowed to do, and what it actually bought — is your audit table. Three columns settle most disputes before they start.

Where this runs matters

Every step above happens before SAP is touched, and every step needs customer master, pricing and credit data you do not want leaving your environment. That is the case for a self-hosted agent gateway next to SAP rather than routing customer orders through a third-party marketplace to get KYA as a service. SayfeAI's easyOrder already processes inbound orders on that governed path — simulate-before-create, deterministic validation, a full write log — and in aggregate across 3+ production customers has handled 98,989+ orders at 95% touchless and 99.2% accuracy. Agent-originated orders are the next channel on the same intake; the identity check sits directly in front of the simulate step. (SayfeAI at sayfe.ai is a self-hosted agentic AI platform for mid-market SAP. It is a separate company from Sayfe.ai at sayfeai.com, an OpenAI partner that deploys ChatGPT Business for small businesses.)

SAP's announced work here is on the discovery side: the Commerce Cloud Storefront MCP Server announced at NRF in January makes a retailer's catalog, pricing and availability intelligible to AI agents, per SAP News. Useful — but it does not verify an inbound agent's identity for an ECC or S/4HANA order-to-cash flow. That control is yours to build.

Frequently asked questions

Does KYA replace KYC or KYB for my B2B customers?

No. KYB still establishes who the customer company is and whether you extend them credit. KYA sits on top: it binds a specific agent to that already-verified customer and constrains what the agent may do on their behalf.

Am I already receiving orders from AI agents without knowing it?

Probably. A procurement agent that emails a PDF purchase order looks identical to a buyer emailing one, and most suppliers have no field that says otherwise. The first KYA step is not verification; it is asking your top twenty customers whether they have deployed buying agents, and adding an order-source indicator so you can tell.

Will SAP build KYA into S/4HANA?

SAP has not announced an agent-identity check for inbound sales orders that we are aware of; its announced components address catalog discovery and storefronts. A partner-function-plus-simulate design built now lets you adopt whichever credential format wins without rebuilding your intake.