The future is here, as they say.
When OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, it didn't take long for businesses and financial institutions to realize that generative AI was a paradigm-shifting innovation thanks to its ability to automate a number of once manual tasks. Use cases abound: AI agents can conduct background research, generate content, write code, analyze data and more.
Payments, however, were the missing piece of the puzzle. No matter how far AI agents could take a given task, consummating a transaction always required human interaction.
Visa, Mastercard and other fintechs that are looking to solve that puzzle by bringing agentic commerce to the masses.
Agentic commerce is when AI agents participate in commercial transactions on behalf of consumers or businesses. For example, a customer can tell ChatGPT to find a black leather coat on Amazon under $200, and purchase it using a credit card.
Mastercard and Visa recently launched separate agentic payment technology that for the first time promises to bring AI together with payments outside of
Mastercard's Agent Pay, an
"The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era, including new merchant interfaces to distinguish trusted agents from bad actors using agentic technology," said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's chief product officer, in a statement. "Recognizing the seismic implications of this evolution, we are keen to collaborate with industry players to advance the standards for agentic payments, such as applying the Model Context Protocol to Secure Remote Commerce. This lays the foundation for scale and builds trust in agentic commerce."
Mastercard will partner with a number of companies to advance its agentic AI initiatives. It is working with Microsoft to integrate the tech company's Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio with Mastercard's payment solutions to develop and scale agentic commerce.
It is also partnering with
Visa unveiled a similar initiative, Visa Intelligence Commerce, that allows AI agents to make purchases on users' behalf.
"As the world is evolving…. Discovery is evolving, and you are now starting your discovery journey on an AI platform," Rubail Birwadker, senior vice president and head of growth products and partnerships at Visa, told American Banker. "We want to make sure that no matter where you are, who you are, if you have a Visa credential in your wallet, that credential can then be used in a
Visa's agentic commerce solution also uses digital, tokenized credentials to ensure that a customer's chosen agent is able to act on that customer's behalf, and allows customers to set spending limits and special conditions that control where, when and how agents can spend. There's also personalization settings that will allow the agent to offer personalized shopping recommendations based on the consumer's spend and purchase history.
Visa's agentic AI partners include Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung, according to the company.
Agentic payments promises to disrupt mobile wallets in the same way that mobile wallets disrupted traditional card transactions, Tony DeSanctis, a senior analyst at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker.
"The checkout and shopping process are full of friction," DeSanctis said. "In a world where I can just tell an AI to buy me my groceries, pay my bills, or even search for the best deals on a specific ticket, flight, item, etc., payments could become completely automated, even beyond mobile wallets today."
DeSanctis expects a "significant ramp-up period," he said. "My guess is that over the next 3 to 5 years, we will be tracking agentic payments the same way we measure mobile wallet and digital payments."
The tokenization of consumer shopping habits provides the payment giants with new levels of insights into consumer preferences, Julia Huang, a founding partner at Vesey Ventures, told American Banker.
"They know all of my transactions, where I've shopped, what I've done historically in the past," Huang said. They know "my preferred airline is Delta or United [or] my preferred hotel is Four Seasons. Based on my actual purchase history, these are very personalized details about my preferences, my mode of decision making, my price bucket."
Visa's Intelligent Commerce platform isn't just another product drop; it's a foundational shift toward monetizing Visa's 3.3 trillion lifetime transactions, Richard Crone, CEO and founder of Crone Consulting LLC, told American Banker.
"Their new Data Tokens hold the potential to replace Google's cookies with consent-based, payment-bound identifiers that track not just identity and purchases, but customer intent, exposure, and personalization, Crone said, adding that turns each AI-initiated transaction into a provable attribution audit trail, similar to how an in-context Google Search commands higher cost per click and cost per acquisition promotional rates over cost per thousand impressions.
Visa and Mastercard may be making waves with new consumer-facing agentic AI solutions, but separately, fintechs are also working to enable agentic payments to other AI agents.
Enter Skyfire Systems, a San Francisco-based payments fintech backed by a16z CSX, Coinbase Ventures, Neuberger Berman and Brevan Howard Digital, has been developing a wallet and payment rails specifically tailored to allow AI agents to pay other AI agents for access to information.
Generative AI has already been accessing troves of information from the web to populate consumers' queries on those platforms. That's been overloading servers, prompting some companies to charge AI agents for access to said data.
"Agents today can go and discover on their own what is out there available to them, but then as soon as they need to have access, or they need to use that [information], they can't complete that transaction," Skyfire founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi told American Banker.
"Once you have funded the wallet, your agent now has the ability to spend out of that wallet and use essentially our protocol to be able to go to different services or data providers, discover what it needs, and then be able to pay for whatever it is, and then immediately get access," Sarhangi said.
Those transactions amount to a fraction of a penny but are still necessary for the bot to do its job, Craig DeWitt, a founder at Skyfire, told American Banker.
"If you are trying to use AI to do something real beyond just, 'Give me text back,' you can't do anything without a payment," DeWitt said.
