Mastercard Says Consumer Choice at the Center of Agent Pay

Watch more: The Agentic Experience With Mastercard’s Chiro Aikat

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence is already becoming part of how consumers search and shop, giving agentic commerce a large base from which to develop. But there’s a challenge when it comes to convincing consumers that agents can act on their behalf without sacrificing the preferences and control they exercise today.

About 132 million consumers are using AI, and as Mastercard U.S. Co-President Chiro Aikat told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, shopping is becoming a significant part of that activity. The number gives agentic commerce a large potential audience that doesn’t first have to be persuaded to use AI.

Aikat compared the development with earlier changes in payments where consumers once had to learn unfamiliar checkout behaviors, including whether to swipe or dip a card. Those behaviors eventually became routine. “EMV, pay by phone and others as well,” Aikat said, naming a few. “Agentic is exactly like that. In many ways, it’s accelerating faster.”

Agentic commerce has an advantage those earlier technologies didn’t necessarily have: Consumers are already encountering AI throughout their daily lives before being asked to let it handle a payment.

But faster familiarity with AI doesn’t mean consumers will hand over spending authority at the same rate. Webster pointed to PYMNTS data showing precisely that divergence.

“We’ve seen this in our data,” Webster said, noting consumers’ “interest over time in terms of delegating authority has declined, even though usage has increased.”

That differs from earlier payment adoption, she said, where repeated use generally produced greater comfort. “Typically in the environments that we’ve seen before in payments, the more you do something, the more comfortable you get, the more you’re willing to do it,” Webster said.

Aikat said agentic commerce shouldn’t be expected to reproduce that pattern.

“I think that delegation and adoption don’t follow the same linear curve,” he said. “Consumers who become familiar with AI agents also learn more about their limitations and become more selective about what they will allow them to do.”

Loyalty Moves Ahead of the Purchase

Giving an artificial intelligence agent purchasing authority becomes more complicated when a consumer’s preferred outcome can’t be reduced to price.

Aikat used airline travel as an example. A shopper may prefer one airline because of accumulated miles or points. An apparel buyer may care about rewards or the return window. A routine household purchase may carry fewer such considerations.

“I strongly believe that agentic commerce will shape loyalty in a different manner,” Aikat predicted. “If you think about loyalty today, it’s a lot about, ‘I make a purchase and I’m expecting loyalty rewards to come through.’”

Agentic commerce can move those preferences ahead of the transaction. An AI agent choosing among several options has to know whether price, points, brand preference, return terms or another consideration should determine the purchase.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay provides an early example of how the company is approaching that process. Aikat described using it for a household purchase of dog food. The AI agent can take information about the pets and their needs, identify suitable products, find where they are sold and, depending on the merchant’s setup, move the consumer into the merchant’s digital experience to complete the purchase using a card on file.

Mastercard has also developed agentic tokens and standards intended to support agent-initiated transactions. Aikat said the company is working with merchants around those standards while keeping the consumer in control of the decision.

The broader question is how those capabilities become ordinary enough for consumers to use without having to think about the machinery underneath them.

“Everything in payments that has been successful has been based on experience, ease of use, and more importantly, trust,” Aikat said.

Watch PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster’s full conversation with Mastercard U.S. Co-President Chiro Aikat for their discussion about:

• Whether agentic commerce will remain a distinct channel.
• How it could become embedded in mobile, eCommerce and recurring payments.
• What banks, merchants and payments providers will need to accommodate as consumers decide how much authority to give their AI agents.