Mastercard CEO says AI agents could soon do your shopping
Agentic payments are becoming increasingly available for AI users — and payments companies are leading the trend.
In a recent interview with Brian Sozzi for Yahoo Finance, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said, “If you zoom out and look for a use-case where AI is going to touch our lives the fastest and most broadly, agentic commerce comes to mind.”
“Agentic commerce … could be an agent, it could be an AI chatbot of your choice,” Miebach said. “It’s going to help you get much better search results, much better recommendations.” But if you choose to transact using the AI after those recommendations, you may soon have some questions about payment security.
Here’s more about how agentic payments work today and how Miebach says they could reshape spending in the future.
Read full interview: Mastercard CEO: Spending growth has been happening across all income bands.
What are agentic payments?
Agentic payments are transactions made by AI on your behalf. Today, those transactions often use virtual agentic credit cards, like the card just announced by Robinhood.
You might already use AI (Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, or another agent) to help you research a product and find different options available online. This payment technology just takes it one step further by allowing AI to make the purchase for you using a set payment method within your spending limits.
For example, you could ask an AI agent to track the price of an item, then buy it automatically once it falls below a certain threshold. Or you could give your AI instructions for a friend’s birthday gift or your grocery list and have it do the research for the right items within your given price range.
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The future of agentic payments
Today’s agentic payments still require user input, whether that means setting a spending limit or giving parameters for the type of product you want.
Over time, Miebach said, “I think we’re going to see a bit of a curve with assisted agentic payments first, and eventually we’ll find our path to just purely autonomous spending.”
But as we give AI more autonomy with payments and financial information, security is a growing concern.
“What happens if something goes wrong?” Miebach said. “Is the agent actually what the agent claims to be? Does it act on your instructions, or does it do something different? And if there’s a misunderstanding, how do you have recourse, and how are you protected?”
Those are all questions that Mastercard plans to address as agentic commerce evolves.
Mastercard has a program called Agent Pay, which integrates with agentic AI and offers secure payments via tokenization, verified agents, and consumer controls. When you use an agentic credit card like the one offered by Robinhood, you can set spending limits and choose to approve any purchase made by your AI agent.
Miebach said he sees a future in which consumers want the same thing in payments that they’ve wanted for decades: simplicity, security, and knowledge of what happens if something goes wrong.
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