Mastercard leads the charge into secure, agent-driven commerce with new AI suite

Mastercard has announced a comprehensive suite of AI tools aimed at transforming commerce through autonomous agents, with a focus on security, interoperability, and industry standards to ensure safe expansion into agentic payments by 2026.

Mastercard is accelerating its push into agentic artificial intelligence for commerce, announcing on Jan. 27 that it will offer a suite of tools for business customers to build, test and deploy AI-driven agents by the second quarter o...

f this year. According to the company, the software will be used to enhance security, payments and customer experience functions and to spur growth, with Mastercard projecting that AI agents will handle “a significant percentage of customer interactions and operational tasks” by 2030.

The Jan. 27 announcement followed a series of public moves laying the technical and commercial groundwork for agentic commerce. According to Mastercard’s materials, the company has worked to enable interoperability between agents and merchants, joining Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol to allow AI agents to communicate with commerce platforms and saying it has collaborated with OpenAI on an agentic protocol to support secure credentials and verifiable agent identities. Mastercard also published an Agentic Token Framework in 2025 intended to register and authenticate agents and to let merchants accept tokenised agent-initiated payments with minimal integration work.

Mastercard has since expanded its product set and partnerships. In April 2025 the company introduced Agent Pay, which Mastercard describes as payments technology designed to let AI platforms execute transactions with token-based protections, and said it would partner with Microsoft and other AI platform providers to scale agentic commerce. By September 2025 the company reported further developer tools, strengthened consulting services and deeper cooperation with Stripe, Google and Antom to make agentic transactions more widely available. In January 2026 Mastercard unveiled an Agent Suite combining technical support, configurable agents and advisory services to help enterprises adopt the technology, and simultaneously set out “Rules of the Road” aimed at establishing standards for user intent, credential security and agent identity in agentic commerce.

Industry players beyond Mastercard are pursuing similar strategies. According to reporting, Visa has been working with a range of AI developers, including OpenAI and Microsoft, to let agents shop and transact on behalf of consumers, while Stripe has collaborated with OpenAI to enable merchant transactions through conversational agents on platforms such as ChatGPT. Mastercard cites these ecosystem developments as part of a broader move toward agent-first commerce that consulting firms expect will expand into functions such as corporate travel management and recurring commercial payments.

Mastercard executives framed the new suite as an effort to give customers practical, secure routes to innovation. “It’s no secret that those who lay the groundwork can embrace new commercial opportunities much faster,” Kaushik Gopal, head of insights and intelligence for Mastercard, said in the company’s Agentic Suite press release. The company says its offering draws on its tokenisation, network security, data capabilities and advisory services to reduce integration friction for merchants and platforms.

Yet the prospect of autonomous agents making purchases has drawn questions from banks and payments executives about potential harms. At the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas, Mike Lozanoff, global head of merchant services at JPMorgan Chase, asked whether an AI agent could “hallucinate and buy something we didn’t tell it to buy?” Industry figures such as Worldpay’s chief product officer have also warned the technology might be exploited by fraudsters, underscoring the challenge of balancing convenience with controls.

Mastercard is pitching technical mitigations to those risks. Its agentic token and authentication proposals seek to ensure transactions are traceable and agents are registered, while the company’s collaborations with platform providers aim to embed credentialing and intent signals at the protocol level. Mastercard says these measures will make agentic commerce transparent and under user control, though independent testing and real‑world deployments will be required to validate that promise at scale.

As payments networks, platform vendors and AI developers converge on agentic commerce, firms will have to reckon with regulatory, fraud‑prevention and consumer‑protection questions as well as interoperability challenges. Mastercard’s roadmap, spanning token frameworks, protocol work with Google and OpenAI collaborations, product launches such as Agent Pay and the Agent Suite, and public principles for agent behaviour, signals an attempt to shape both the technology and the rules that govern it. Whether those efforts translate into secure, widely adopted agentic payments will depend on how effectively the ecosystem addresses the technical vulnerabilities and trust issues flagged by banks, merchants and regulators.

Source: Noah Wire Services