The movement to inject agentic artificial intelligence into the shopping experience has taken another step forward.
Mastercard has unveiled updates to its Agent Pay platform while expanding agentic commerce partnerships to drive adoption, including recent collaborations with Stripe, Google, and Ant International’s Antom.
The platform’s reach is also broadening. Mastercard noted that Citi and U.S. Bank Mastercard cardholders will get early access to Agent Pay, with availability extending to all U.S. cardholders by the holiday season. An international rollout will follow soon after.
Driving Organizational Adoption
In addition to the expansion, Mastercard announced new features aimed at driving organizational adoption of Agent Pay. These include a developer toolkit that enables integration of AI agents with Mastercard’s APIs, as well as a consulting service to help issuers, acquirers, and merchants get up to speed.
The company is also introducing insight tokens, designed to protect consumer data while delivering a more personalized experience in the agentic commerce environment. In parallel, Mastercard is working with the FIDO Alliance’s Payments Working Group to develop industry standards for this emerging technology.
The Magic of Agentic Commerce
Implementing standards and protections is key to the broader adoption of agentic commerce. Consumers may feel comfortable consulting AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity during the shopping experience, but entrusting the entire process—including payment—to an AI agent will likely cause some reticence.
Despite these concerns, Craig Vosburg, Chief Services Officer at Mastercard, noted the transformative promise of agentic commerce: “Payments must be native to the agentic experience.”
While stronger infrastructure will no doubt go far towards agentic commerce adoption, another obstacle remains: agentic commerce also requires both consumer awareness and active participation.
“In the product discussion that Visa had when they did their product launch talking about agentic, one of the things that resonated with me was it was one of the products where people said, ‘We are going to have to pull consumers along,’” James Wester, Co-Head of Payments told PaymentsJournal. “‘We are going to have to show them and educate them on the magic of agentic commerce.’”
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