Conventional wisdom has long held that larger enterprises possess natural advantages in cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Bigger budgets, deeper technical teams and greater access to advanced tooling should theoretically produce stronger defenses.
In practice, those scale advantages did produce stronger enterprise cyber and identity defenses. At least, at one time in history. Then artificial intelligence (AI), and AI agents, burst onto the scene.
Findings in PYMNTS Intelligence’s new report in collaboration with Trulioo, “Scale Amplification: How Revenue Amplifies Agent-Driven Identity,” show that large enterprises are increasingly the ones contending with today’s rising wave of AI-generated cyberattacks. Larger firms, with their larger footprints, can be more susceptible to the AI-powered spoofing of identity documents thanks to the industrialization of deepfakes and automated data scraping capabilities by adversarial cyber actors.
The majority of companies (58%) with more than $1 billion in annual revenue surveyed reported encountering AI-generated documents or deepfake-related attacks during the past year, a full 11 percentage points above smaller firms. Automated scraping attacks also rose sharply with scale.
Against this backdrop, enterprise-grade firms increasingly depend on identity systems not only to stop fraudsters, but also to determine whether legitimate customers can transact, onboard, access services and remain engaged. In that environment, every authentication decision becomes a revenue decision. The report also found that larger firms above $1 billion in revenue were the most likely to report rising false positives and transaction decline rates as they tried to tighten security.
The contradiction is becoming impossible to ignore: the more aggressive identity controls become, the more likely companies are to block legitimate users, eroding both customer trust and business revenue. And the larger the enterprise, the worse the imbalance appears to be.
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The New Enterprise Cost Center Is Lost Trust
Large enterprises are especially vulnerable because complexity works against them. Many operate fragmented identity environments assembled over years of acquisitions, regional expansion and overlapping security systems. Different authentication standards across apps, vendors and customer channels create inconsistencies that attackers exploit.
The instinctive response is often tighter controls. But more friction can create a different kind of risk. Among companies generating more than $1 billion annually, one-third reported rising digital transaction decline rates over the past year, while 22% reported increasing false positives that incorrectly flag legitimate customers as suspicious. Those failures are not merely operational inconveniences. They represent lost revenue opportunities.
As AI agents begin interacting autonomously across financial systems, marketplaces and commerce environments, verifying identity becomes substantially more difficult and substantially more important. The challenge is no longer simply proving a user is human. Increasingly, it involves determining whether an autonomous actor, synthetic credential or machine-generated interaction should be trusted at all.
The result is that identity infrastructure is moving closer to the center of business strategy, joining payments, acquisition and customer experience as a determinant of growth performance.
Read the report: Scale Amplification: How Revenue Amplifies Agent-Driven Identity
Historically, companies treated fraud prevention and customer experience as adjacent but separate functions. The emergence of AI-driven identity threats is collapsing that distinction. Identity infrastructure now operates at the intersection of security, growth and customer retention simultaneously.
Increasingly, executives are recognizing that identity performance should be measured not only through fraud reduction metrics, but also through conversion rates, onboarding completion, retention and customer lifetime value. The economics of digital identity are changing from defensive return on investment (ROI) to revenue ROI. In the emerging agentic economy, identity infrastructure is becoming growth infrastructure.
For smaller firms, the future of agentic commerce may even come with a notable white space opportunity. After all, according to the report’s data, even the world’s largest enterprises are still struggling to adapt to its shifting parameters.
At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.
