AI agents need verifiable ID cards : Here is what it means, and why it is important

Picture this: The year is 2030. You need to plan a trip to Bali with your family. You ask your AI agent to take the task over, who not only plans an itinerary for you but also can book flights, hotels, and rides, while ensuring that you get the best deals.

A few years back, this might have sounded like sci-fi, but with the kind of exposure we have had with artificial intelligence in the past couple of years, we know it is just a matter of when and not if before this scenario becomes a reality.

A reality where you do not have to open three applications or compare five websites to execute three tasks. This is what your AI agent is going to do for you, and it might be working in tandem with other agents to complete the task. For instance, an AI agent booking a flight ticket will negotiate with the airline’s booking agent, transact with the payments agent, and coordinate with the hotel’s agent to update your timelines-all this while you are sleeping, or working out.


We are moving towards the era of Agentic AI, where apps might be put on the back burner-from an “app for everything” to an “agent for everything”. And by estimates, the scale of this is going to be enormous.

New research by the International Data Corporation (IDC) foresees explosive growth for AI agents over the next five years. The report forecasts that the number of active AI agents by 203o will be 2.2 billion, depicting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 139% from around 28.6 million agents in the current year.

The tasks executed annually by these agents will skyrocket to a staggering 415 trillion in 2030, from 44 billion in 2025. The same research has pointed out that 60% of the global Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) plan to invest in AI agents during the next twelve months.

For India, this scale of Agentic AI is not a mere software category; it is an infrastructure opportunity like none other.

Beyond building AI agents, India’s opportunity is bigger:

In the last decade, India has created digital systems at scale with no parallels in global digital systems, including Aadhaar, UPI, JanDhan, and other systems where hundreds of millions of people have access.

The advantage India has demonstrated has been the ability to build the rails underneath the digital services, and not just the services. This success in building the rails becomes all the more important in the AI agent economy.

The question right now is not building AI agents, which India is more than capable of pulling off; the pertinent question is: how do these agents interact with one another, safely and at scale?

This is where India’s infrastructure-building ability comes into play. The country has the expertise, as well as the workforce, to build this infrastructure for itself, and for the world.

And the opportunity has knocked at the right time. A time when the country is already exploring what an agentic AI could mean for business. India is working towards enabling AI agents to execute certain UPI payments without human approval for the transactions, requiring safeguards.

But as the agent economy keeps drifting towards the question of infrastructure, every layer will have this one important question for the agent. Who are you? Because at this scale, the names and descriptions of the AI agents won’t suffice. Interacting with businesses, consumers, and other agents will require an identity.

The Identity of AI agents:

An AI agent introducing itself on behalf of a person or a business to another entity is not the same as the agent having a cryptographically verifiable identity that proves it.

This becomes all the more important when an agent is allowed to negotiate, make purchases, payments, or close deals on behalf of an individual or an enterprise.

This is akin to the problem the early internet faced, when developers realised that a website needed more than a name, and what came into being was the Domain Name System (DNS), which gave websites domain names and made them recognisable as well as discoverable.

Eventually, SSL/TLS certificates equipped users to establish encrypted, authenticated connections, making websites easier to use and, more importantly, helping make commercial activity on the open internet possible.

The agentic AI, or the agent economy as we like to call it, has a similar conundrum to solve, or simply an infrastructure gap to fill: AI agents need to establish their identity to attain trust.

This is what drives the emergence of Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard created to make the agentic internet safer.

Just like websites use domain names and DNS to make it easy for people to find them, ANS extends that familiar model to AI agents, using domain names and DNS as the foundation for agent identity. The emerging ANS architecture is a combination of certificates and DNS-based discovery, with contemplation going on, including transparency logs and lifecycle records to establish identity as well as history.

And this is not something that is far-fetched, or a research-paper theory. Agent Identity by GoDaddy is a concrete real-world implementation of ANS where people are already registering their AI agents. GoDaddy describes this as the identity layer for AI agents, and allows you to discover verified agents with DNS-anchored identity that works across MCP, A2A, and any other protocol.

Agent Identity by GoDaddy ensures every agent in its registry is domain-validated via ACME, issued dual certificates, and sealed into an immutable Transparency Log. This gives humans as well as agents the ability to identify an agent independently, and not rely on words from others.

This identity layer will be instrumental in adding the requisite trust into the agent economy, and allow the world to scale on this ecosystem.

And if scrutinised with a little interest, this trust-building might be the next opportunity for startups and entrepreneurs in India. The next generation of founders can now focus on building not only AI agents, but also the infrastructure that gives these agents a trusted place on the internet.