Ushering in the intelligence layer

Today, AI is already driving meaningful productivity gains at home and at work. But this is only the beginning.

In the not-too-distant future, AI agents may even outnumber people. They’ll work as personal shoppers for consumers, inventory managers for businesses, teammates for software engineers, and guards for digital infrastructure. They’ll offload hours of tedious tasks for small business owners and hyper-personalize e-commerce experiences for consumers.

Working autonomously and interacting with one another, agents will form a new distributed intelligence layer built upon and woven into the digital economy. This marks the next major evolution of commerce for businesses and consumers alike. 

Mastercard has been putting AI to work long before generative AI entered the mainstream. Machine learning and advanced analytics power fraud detection, risk decisioning, authorization and the real-time movement of billions of transactions across our global payments network every year. Over time, AI has evolved to now underpin capabilities that help us understand what happened and anticipate what might happen next.

Now, as AI moves from assistive to autonomous, we have extended that foundation to support a new model of commerce — one that must be smarter, more secure and deeply personal. 

Agentic commerce only works if three things scale together: payments to enable transactions, trust and security to anchor those transactions, and AI-powered services to make them smarter and more personal. Mastercard is accelerating all three — building on our network to turn emerging capabilities into real-world applications. 

A year ago, we launched Agent Pay to create a secure way for AI agents to initiate and complete transactions, a critical first step to bringing agentic transactions into everyday commerce. We have scaled that capability with live agentic transactions for businesses of all sizes in Asia Pacific and beyond. For example, we’re working with partners in Australia and New Zealand to enable AI‑driven procurement, sourcing from approved suppliers, placing orders and initiating payments on behalf of businesses. 

As AI systems begin to act on behalf of consumers and businesses, trust becomes the defining constraint. That’s why we’re embedding security and verification directly into the flow of agentic transactions.

Verifiable Intent represents a critical step toward establishing a shared industry standard for how AI agents operate in commerce, ensuring that every action taken by an AI agent is grounded in a consumer’s explicit permissions and preferences, with a clear, auditable record of decision-making across the ecosystem. This approach is already gaining momentum, with Mastercard working alongside partners like the FIDO Alliance and Google to help advance common frameworks for trusted, user-consented interactions in AI-driven experiences. As adoption and ubiquity grows, it helps set a consistent foundation for trust and accountability across participants.

At the same time, tokenization and identity verification continue to protect transactions at scale, extending the same safeguards that power today’s network into the agentic world. Together, these capabilities open the door for agents to simplify areas like dispute management — surfacing the right context, validating the user’s intent and helping accelerate resolution with greater speed, transparency and confidence. 

Beyond enabling and securing transactions, we’re helping our partners unlock the full value of AI across the commerce journey. Today, one in three of Mastercard’s services is powered by AI, and these are growing at a massive rate.

For example, Insight Tokens turn permissioned Mastercard insights into secure, actionable signals. These signals can help AI agents, issuers, merchants and digital platforms deliver more relevant product discovery, recommendations, offers, rewards and contextual shopping experiences. We’re working with leading AI companies to adopt and launch these capabilities and deliver greater personalization across their agentic experiences.

Our services continue with tools like Shopping Muse, which reimagined how consumers discover and navigate products through intuitive, conversational commerce. And it extends through our agentic consulting and AI-powered services, including Agent Suite and Virtual C-Suite, where we help merchants, issuers and platforms redesign their experiences, structure their data and prepare their systems for an agent-driven world. Taken together, these capabilities form a cohesive stack: signals that inform decisions, experiences that guide them and services that help operationalize them.

Our latest merchant-focused capabilities now available through Merchant Cloud will let businesses integrate intelligent AI agents to their websites and mobile apps. These new tools enable merchants to deliver end-to-end customer experiences, from discovery through to post-purchase, supporting consumers to conveniently search for products with recommendations.

Every major era of transformation — whether driven by electricity, computing or connectivity — has depended on systems people could rely on.

For over six decades, including two as a public company, Mastercard has played a role in stitching together the fabric of global commerce, and it’s no different with AI. We’re building the essential foundation for agentic commerce: durable infrastructure, built to evolve, which turns experimentation into real-world execution. 

The future of AI will be defined not just by what’s possible, but by what can be trusted. That has been Mastercard’s role for sixty years: putting intelligence into production to enable participation, resilience and growth at scale.