According to a report by Paul Gillin on SiliconANGLE, Experian is expanding its artificial intelligence operations and deepening the use of AI agents in its business through a commercial agent-based platform and a partnership with ServiceNow. The move comes after the company launched an AI-based virtual assistant in the spring, and it is now introducing the Agent Operating System (or Agent OS) — an infrastructure designed to embed its risk management, identity, and decision-making capabilities into enterprise workflows.
Agent OS Platform and the ServiceNow Partnership
According to Vijay Mehta, Experian’s new Chief AI Officer, the Agent OS system is a platform capability supporting commercial products rather than a standalone product. The goal of the system is to provide customers with high-quality information more quickly, increase the volume of clients the company can serve, and onboard new customers. As an implementation example, Mehta noted that a customer could incorporate the credit rating giant’s model risk management capabilities into an existing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) system. Other immediate applications include onboarding and verification of new employees.
The current deployment builds on years of experimentation with machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. Experian believes the technology is capable of processing information faster and identifying patterns that earlier approaches missed, potentially helping lenders assess consumers with little or no credit history. Additionally, the tools help computer systems fight fraud, with the report noting that nearly all fraudsters now use advanced AI themselves. Mehta emphasized that the company is no longer in the proof-of-concept (POC) phase but in the enterprise scaling phase, which he said is different from simply using ChatGPT to achieve a little bit of extra efficiency.
ServiceNow is the first partner deploying the new capabilities. ServiceNow’s AI agents will connect to Experian’s Ascend analytics and development platform, allowing customers to integrate trusted data, decision-making mechanisms, and governance capabilities into existing enterprise workflows. The partnership gives Experian access to a wide range of business and technology processes, enabling it to sell additional services to existing customers and reach new ones. Early adopters of the platform are primarily using the company’s model risk management service, with the initial target audience including insurers, financial services providers, and lenders, alongside any organization using ServiceNow. The company plans to launch additional products moving forward.
Containment Mechanisms and AI Agent Controls
Experian’s accelerated expansion into AI agents comes against the backdrop of a July hacking incident in which agents from OpenAI Group PBC penetrated servers at Hugging Face Inc., stole files and customer information, and bypassed guardrails meant to prevent them from accessing the internet. Because Experian operates in a heavily regulated industry, the company was well aware of the risks when building the service and worked to ensure that agents cannot overstep their defined boundaries.
To that end, a common gateway was established to provide controls over agent traffic, including supervision over model selection, prompts, data leaving the environment, and enterprise policy enforcement. Identity and access management (IAM) is tightly supervised, with logging systems and monitoring forming part of the overall control system. Experian’s control model checks agent activity against applicable regulatory requirements and uses adversarial testing — a process in which one agent tests another agent’s actions to verify compliance with rules and policies. Mehta noted that no agent can escape into the wilderness without the company's knowledge and without its ability to disable it. Access permissions are based on granting the minimum authority required for the task alone, similar to the process of setting permissions for a new employee.
Human Involvement and Platform Architecture
In the area of decision-making, certain customer service and back-office processes can operate autonomously, while regulated decisions retain human involvement (human-in-the-loop). Mehta explained that humans are involved in major "yes-or-no" decisions involving regulated outcomes, so that the final step remains deterministic and human-supervised.
Experian makes its agentic capabilities accessible through application programming interfaces (APIs) and via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects AI applications to tools and data. The system can operate via a user interface or in a "headless" setup behind the scenes of other applications. In addition, the Agent OS system can switch underlying models depending on the workload. According to Mehta, many financial services tasks can run on simpler, less expensive models rather than costly frontier models. The service combines commercial models, open-weight models, and open-source models.
Federated Data Management, Models, and Employee Training
Experian builds agents using a range of commercial tools, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) Bedrock, alongside internal technology developed within the company. The company maintains a dedicated registry and repository that enable the reuse of agents, skills, and content across an organization employing more than 1,000 data scientists. The supporting architecture includes a semantic layer that provides uniform data definitions across Experian's portfolio, with knowledge graphs linking the information so agents can use it consistently. Rather than moving all data into a single central repository, the global company links distributed data assets.
The company's testing processes include sandbox environments, synthetic data, and other test sources, alongside monitoring of deployed agents. Linking model activity to underlying data supports explainability and validation of results. The organizational accountability structure operates in a federated format, where regional support teams and central technology and platform teams share operational responsibilities. Mehta’s group builds the capabilities, and business unit teams integrate them into products designed for external customers.
Experian views AI as the future of its business and conducts mandatory employee training on responsible AI use, prompting, and connecting data to tools. Mehta noted that the goal is to free employees for other tasks, but declined to discuss specific job impacts. He compared the evolution of AI to the growth of e-commerce, which initially sparked fear, but now everyone feels comfortable sending and exchanging goods and services online. He estimated that a similar process will occur with AI, where there will be more specialists, so talent must be upskilled and trained to perform other jobs. The company's current challenge is translating the shared infrastructure into repeatable deployments with measurable results, with the initial deployment alongside ServiceNow serving as a test for adopting these capabilities across broader enterprise workflows.