Mastercard accelerates AI shopping ahead of the holidays

• Key Insight: Mastercard is enhancing its agentic AI bench. 
• What's at Stake: New forms of technology are changing shopping and payments.
• Forward Look: Visa and other payment firms are aggressively investing in new forms of AI. 

An agentic artificial intelligence arms race is hitting the payments industry, with Mastercard pushing a fresh menu of products designed to rapidly scale the technology before the end of the year. 
The card network has partnered with Stripe, Google and Ant International's subsidiary Antom business payments firm to scale agentic payments for digital merchants and platforms. Agentic commerce refers to using agentic AI, a form of artificial intelligence that performs tasks such as shopping or payments with minimal or no human supervision. Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and other companies are pursuing agentic AI to enhance merchant services, creating competitive pressure on banks and financial services companies to develop a strategy.  

"If it takes off, agentic commerce could be as incrementally beneficial as the shift from offline to online commerce," Jeffries analysts said in a research note on Visa and Mastercard's moves in agentic AI. "The card networks are expected to be the payment mechanism in agentic AI."

The card networks can establish trust in the new technology by setting rules around liability/disputes and what constitutes a valid agent-initiated transaction, by registering agents and by tokenizing transactions, Jeffries said.

Mastercard's AI tools

By the start of the holiday shopping period on November 28 (Black Friday), all Mastercard cardholders will be enabled for Mastercard Agent Pay in the U.S., with global deployment "shortly" after. The card network also released Agent Toolkit, which enables AI assistants and agentic tools to access and interpret Mastercard's application programming interface documentation using the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, server, which connects AI applications to other technology systems. The agent toolkit supports integration with AI platforms like Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot, which Mastercard contends will make its APIs "easier to integrate" into agentic technology. MCP also supports the Agent2Agent protocol, according to Mastercard. 

The card brand additionally released Agent Sign-Up, which lets Agent Toolkit users identify agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products. Other products are Insight Tokens, which enable security for agentic commerce, and agentic consulting services. 

Citi and U.S. Bank are the first announced bank partners for the expanded AI shopping tools, which will lead to new services for the banks' Mastercard cardholders.

Read more about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence | American Banker

Mastercard has made several moves into new forms of AI over the past year. The payment network launched Agent Pay earlier in 2025. The platform expands Mastercard's existing generative AI technology, which enhances customer service, security and onboarding, generating automated responses to customers. Agent Pay mines the card network's data and AI tools to help shoppers curate a mix of purchases for an event, aid merchants on supply chain management or help a retailer build a marketing or sales program.

The card network has added partners such as Microsoft and IBM, which is contributing B2B technology, and payment firms like PayPal's Braintree and Checkout.com for security. Agent Pay's security and authentication use tokenization, a process that replaces existing account numbers with one-off numbers that make the card useless if stolen. Mastercard is also using Databricks software to train the card network's gen AI engine to produce responses to users with less human interaction. 

Mastercard did not comment on its AI releases by deadline. 

"AI-powered payments aren't just a trend — they're a transformation," said Craig Vosburg, chief services officer at Mastercard, in a release. "Payments must be native to the agentic experience. We're building the infrastructure for a new generation of intelligent transactions, where consumers and developers can empower AI agents to act on their behalf with trust, transparency and precision."

Agents on the way

Among other payment firms, PayPal has advanced its agentic AI strategy to focus on travel shopping and payments as an early use, arguing the mix of search, booking and checkout for travel are a good mix for AI. 

Stripe's strategy includes tools for agentic AI developers, and Block earlier this year launched a similar developer portal for agentic AI. Stripe and Block focus on small- to medium-size businesses that are in the early stages of deployment. In China, Alipay last week integrated its agentic AI payment technology in Luckin Coffee, which supports payments through AI conversations. Consumers can use the Luckin Coffee app to place orders and complete checkout through natural language conversations with Luckin's AI assistant. 

Avoiding agentic AI threatens banks. If banks and merchants do nothing, agentic commerce disintermediation will erode 8% to 13% of gross merchandise volume within two to three years, according to Crone Consulting. 

"Doing nothing is a self-liquidating strategy that directly transfers value to agentic wallets," Richard Crone, a payments consultant, told American Banker, saying his firm estimates that banks not participating in agentic payments risk a 5% to 15% decline in new account acquisition, a 5% to 15% increase in dormant and closed accounts, and a 7% to 30% increase in natural age per account.

And Mastercard Agent Pay can go live without merchant acceptance, which differs from most new payment technology, Crone said, adding Mastercard's technology can bypass traditional onboarding. "This breaks the two-sided network model where both issuers and acquirers had to opt in," Crone said. 

AI agents control product selection and payment routing, Crone said. "If issuers don't embed agentic payments inside their apps, they risk invisibility as agent-driven wallets divert spend to other tenders.

"That's why I call Black Friday, just 74 days away, 'Disintermediation Day," Crone said. "Mastercard is signaling: 'ready or not, we're launching.'"