For many shoppers, the pursuit is the point — comparing prices, researching features, finding deals, anticipating delivery. And the recent emergence of agentic AI shopping experiences is a boon to them — whether you’re a busy mom planning her family’s weekly grocery haul, a grandfather searching for the season’s hottest toy for his granddaughter, or a young couple furnishing their new home.

These intelligent agents know what we like, know when we need things and know how to offer them up — all while streamlining the path from discovery to purchase. This signals the next evolution of digital commerce, with conversational AI delivering curated, contextual shopping experiences powered by deeply personalized recommendations and seamless, embedded transactions.

This week, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, and the Agentic Commerce Protocol that powers it, meaning Mastercard Agent Pay and Agentic Tokens can be used on OpenAI’s platform for the very first time, transforming digital commerce by combining cutting-edge AI with seamless payments.

Citi and US Bank cardholders are already enabled for Mastercard Agent Pay-powered transactions, with all U.S. Mastercard cardholders being equipped to do so by mid-November, and cardholders globally following shortly thereafter.

Agentic Tokens — dynamic digital credentials that empower AI agents to transact safely and transparently on the consumer’s behalf – are core to Mastercard Agent Pay. We’re bringing the same tokenization technology that today safeguards mobile and online payments into agentic commerce, ensuring each transaction is grounded by advanced security. With every interaction, trust and safety are prioritized — giving users unparalleled convenience, choice and control. Security and trust aren’t just features; they are the foundation for the growth and adoption of agentic AI transactions. 

Agentic tokens have been built to register, verify and recognize agentic transactions. That means that each time an agent acts on your behalf — even for a recurring payment — it does so with the permissions and limits you define, keeping you in full control. Every transaction is tied to a specific, authorized Mastercard Agent Pay interaction so that you understand which agent acted on your behalf and from where the goods were purchased. It also weaves in advanced fraud prevention and dispute support to ensure that agentic transactions are more intelligent, secure and personalized.

And agentic tokens are enabling more than everyday shopping. They can automate and safeguard any type of transaction — from small businesses managing logistics to corporate purchasing to optimizing payment terms across borders, unlocking new possibilities for the entire payments value chain. 

As we developed this solution, we understood that enabling payments for AI agents requires more than just a powerful engine — it’s about making payments feel native to the agent environment and guiding our partners through this journey. That can only be done by harnessing the collective expertise of the payments industry to shape a future where agentic payments are synonymous with trust, transparency and security. 

We’re building a secure, transparent, interoperable agentic ecosystem that powers frictionless digital commerce experiences. This includes joining forces with innovators across the commerce ecosystem, to build broad industry support — from AI platforms and providers to issuers and payments enablers — to ensure that agentic transactions are not only secure, but also scalable and widely accepted across digital commerce platforms, accelerating adoption and trust.

A perfect example of this collaboration is our work with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group. Together we are developing a Verifiable Credential standard for payments that confirms key details such as amount, merchant and product details, and enables the secure and consent-driven conveyance of consumer intent. This work aims to ensure transactions are approved by shoppers, leading to more secure and reliable agentic payments.

These collaborations not only help advance the technology but also deliver a scalable and unified approach to realize the full promise of AI-driven transactions for everyone involved.

And to help businesses get started, we have created an Agent Toolkit for developers, giving AI assistants and agentic tools seamless access to Mastercard’s API documentation using structured, machine-readable content via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

The key lesson: Payments cannot be an afterthought — they must be embedded and interoperable. Ultimately, Mastercard Agent Pay is not merely a payments solution; it is a trust layer. It guarantees that as agents become more autonomous, the transactions they initiate remain secure, transparent and aligned with the intent of its users.

As agentic AI continues to evolve, Mastercard Agent Pay will be there to ensure every transaction is as intelligent and secure as the agents behind them.