DataDome launches Priority Protect virtual waiting room to manage AI shopping agents and bots

DataDome debuts Priority Protect, a virtual waiting room built for AI shopping agents - SiliconANGLE

DataDome debuts Priority Protect, a virtual waiting room built for AI shopping agents Bot and agent trust management company DataDome SAS today launched Priority Protect, a virtual waiting room product designed to sort human shoppers, authorized artificial intelligence agents and malicious bots before they reach the front of the queue during high-demand sales events. The product extends DataDome's existing bot detection engine into queue management, classifying every request in real time and applying separate access policies for humans, trusted AI agents and bots. The release is seeking to address the issue where retailers and ticketing platforms are confronting a shift in how flash sales actually unfold. Traditional virtual waiting rooms were built to absorb scalability spikes from human shoppers refreshing a page. AI agents, by contrast, do not refresh but instead run continuously, react to inventory changes in milliseconds, and can hit a checkout flow at machine speed the instant a product drops. DataDome says that during a recent midnight ticket sale for a major sporting event, 31% of queue traffic on its customer's site was bot traffic, accounting for 2.4 million of 7.8 million requests. The company argues that conventional queue tools, which make a single admission decision when a visitor arrives and then trust the session, cannot tell the difference between a legitimate buyer and an automated agent that changes behavior once inside. Priority Protect runs continuous in-session validation, re-evaluating visitors throughout a session and re-challenging or removing them if behavior shifts. Classification draws on 5 trillion daily signals from across DataDome's network. Operators can set capacity, release rates and access policies for each traffic class through a dashboard or application programming interface, scope rules to specific URLs and route trusted users or approved agents into priority lanes using custom attributes. The waiting room itself runs on the customer's own infrastructure with branded templates, position tracking and estimated wait times, rather than redirecting shoppers to a third-party domain. "Peak moments should drive revenue, not outages," said Chief Product Officer Pradheep Sampath. "A virtual waiting room that cannot tell a human customer from a bot or an unauthorized AI agent has no way to guarantee fairness. Priority Protect was built with a fraud detection foundation, so businesses can guarantee that every spot in line goes to a real customer or an agent they actually trust." DataDome counts Etsy Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and SoundCloud Ltd. among its customers. The product launch follows DataDome's April 2025 release of large language model detection and intent-based AI models, part of a broader pivot at the company toward distinguishing legitimate AI agents from unauthorized ones, rather than treating all automated traffic as hostile. Priority Protect is available now. Pricing was not disclosed.

DataDome Launches a Virtual Waiting Room for AI Shoppers | PYMNTS.com

The company said the platform is designed to manage surging traffic from both human shoppers and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered buying agents during high-demand events such as product drops, ticket sales and flash promotions. Unlike traditional virtual queues that primarily focus on handling traffic spikes, Priority Protect aims to distinguish between trusted AI agents, malicious bots and legitimate consumers in real time, per the release. The launch comes as retailers and marketplaces face a new challenge from agentic artificial intelligence systems that can rapidly add products to carts, compare prices across websites and potentially lock up inventory before a purchase is completed. DataDome said traditional fraud and bot-detection systems often intervene too late in the transaction flow, after inventory has already been reserved or checkout processes have started. DataDome's new system uses what the company calls "intent-aware" analysis to prioritize traffic and determine which users or agents should gain access during peak-demand periods, according to the release. The platform is part of the company's broader push into "agent trust" infrastructure, which focuses on authenticating and monitoring AI agents interacting with commerce platforms. The move reflects a growing shift across commerce and cybersecurity industries as businesses prepare for AI agents to play a larger role in online shopping. Companies including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have increasingly pushed artificial intelligence systems capable of executing tasks on behalf of users, including researching products, booking services and making purchases. DataDome, founded in 2015, provides bot protection and cyberfraud prevention tools for websites, mobile apps and APIs. The company previously raised $42 million in Series C funding to expand its AI-driven bot detection platform. PYMNTS has reported that the rise of agentic commerce is forcing merchants and payment companies to rethink fraud prevention, authentication and customer experience strategies as AI agents begin acting more independently inside digital transactions. "As AI-driven transactions scale, fraud threats are evolving just as quickly," PYMNTS wrote last month. "Traditional detection models rooted in human behavior patterns are increasingly ineffective against machine-speed attacks."