notes: events/talks/kericonf26-d2-04-davies-acdcs-for-enterprises

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events/talks/kericonf26-d2-04-davies-acdcs-for-enterprises Alan Davies: ACDCs for Enterprises (KERIConf 2026) summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the curated transcript; unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only, no quotation partner 758 # Alan Davies: ACDCs for Enterprises (KERIConf 2026) **Abstract.** Alan Davies of Digital Trust Foundry described how enterprises can begin using ACDCs (Authentic Chained Data Containers) and KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) without rebuilding their systems. He set a long-term vision of signed intent against a near-term approach he calls execution trust, applied first to high-value transactions, and described his company's platform. The talk is for business and product audiences weighing adoption. ## Summary Davies opened by saying the world needs simpler messages about what KERI and ACDCs can deliver, building on Thomas Mayfield's earlier overview. He traced trust from face-to-face reputation, where fraud was limited in scale, to remote transactions over the telephone, fax and the internet. The internet's answer was usernames, passwords and session tokens, and the result, in his view, has been widespread online fraud that detection alone keeps losing against. His long-term vision is a signed-intent world, perhaps four or five years out. A person asks an AI agent on their device to do something, such as moving money between accounts; the agent wraps the request in an ACDC and signs it after biometric authentication, adds further signatures such as a parent's where needed, and attaches relevant credentials such as a SEDI (state-endorsed digital identity) credential. The bank verifies the request, executes it and records it, without a login. He expects passwords and two-factor codes to linger but become less necessary. Getting there means every online service rearchitecting to accept signed requests from customers who act as their own identity providers, and he expects resistance from federated identity providers and data harvesters. Because that will not happen within a year, he argued for starting smaller. Today, autonomous agents act more and more, and logs record only what an account did, not who did it. He defined trustability as the ability to make a sound trust decision about information arriving over the internet, and execution trust as applying that check immediately before acting: before paying on a purchase order, hiring on presented qualifications or executing a wire transfer. Wrapping a wire request in an ACDC signed by the account owner lets the bank verify it, decide and keep a verifiable record. The same pattern works inside one trust domain, for example having a CIO (chief information officer) sign approval of a possibly AI-generated production change, and across domains, for example a CEO signing a contract before it goes to a partner, with multisig where several approvers are needed. The benefits he listed are a hard gate in place of weak two-factor checks, no need to rearchitect existing systems, a large cut in fraud on high-value transactions, and gradual familiarity with the technology, one bite at a time, with another reason for businesses to obtain a vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier). Digital Trust Foundry offers a multi-tenant platform with its own witnesses and watchers and a trustables API that wraps content in an ACDC, routes it to the named signers or roles and returns it for verification. The company seeks partners with existing applications and offers about 30 interactive examples, including verifiable résumés. In questions he accepted trustworthiness as a near synonym, described the choices people face today (blind faith, ignoring a message, or manual checking), and recounted a recent bank-impersonation phone call, noting Provenant's KERI-based work on that problem. ## Key terms signed intent, trustability, execution trust, hard gate, trust decision, trustables API, single and cross trust domain, one bite at a time ## Claims and their evidence - Wrapping a high-value request such as a wire transfer in an ACDC signed by an authorized signer lets the executing system verify it and keep a cryptographically verifiable record of what it was asked to do. [informative] - Execution trust can be added to existing business applications through API calls, without rearchitecting them. [presenter-reported] - Digital Trust Foundry runs a multi-instance, multi-tenant platform that implements KERI and ACDCs with its own witness and watcher network and offers a trustables API. [presenter-reported] - The platform has about 30 interactive use-case examples across industries, including verifiable résumés. [presenter-reported] - Within four or five years, AI agents on personal devices will send signed requests in place of logins for many transactions. [presenter-reported] ## Related Thomas Mayfield's KERIConf 2026 talk; Samuel Smith's work on individual control; SEDI; the vLEI; Provenant's work on caller verification; Digital Trust Foundry. ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the curated transcript (d2-04-alan-davies-acdcs-for-enterprises.md), all of it (about 29 minutes of speech in a 36-minute recording). No quotations; paraphrase only. Not yet read by Mark.

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