Mastercard, Visa Building AI Shopping Agents

Consumers will soon delegate online shopping tasks to agentic agents, moving brands into a new world of advertising and online commerce. Credit card and payment systems are working with AI experts to build the technology.

Visa and Mastercard are bringing the power of their respective networks, data, and security to drive AI commerce through agentic agents. Consumers will set spending limits and the AI agents will figure out the remainder of the transaction -- for example, searching for products, ordering groceries or booking vacations. 

The two companies, independently, this week announced initiatives. Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI to find and buy, but the company said it also opens Visa’s payment network to the developers and engineers to build foundational AI agents that will change commerce.

Mastercard also announced Agent Pay, a program that also introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens to secure cashless payments based on a secure card on file. This program will also connect with Mastercard Payment Passkeys and programmable payments such as recurring expenses and subscriptions.

Changes are coming for advertisers, too. Martin Balaam, CEO and co-founder of Pimberly, an AI-powered PIM network, said "ecommerce is moving away from keyword-driven SEO to context-aware, AI-driven recommendations."

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He believes the shift "will completely upend how users discover products, but it also requires the AI training data to be extremely diverse and raises privacy questions for consumers, who will need to adjust to hyper-personalized product recommendations from chatbots."


Visa and Mastercard were joined by PayPal, which announced its own agentic commerce offering.

PayPal has released developer tools such as a remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which acts as a bridge allowing AI tools to access and interact with external data sources security, and Agent Toolkit at its PayPal's Dev Days event. The company laid the groundwork for agentic commerce by bringing together developers, engineers, creators, and builders with companies like Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Microsoft.

Its AI shopping companion is supported by Google Cloud and Google’s Agent to Agent (A2A) Protocol that allows merchants to integrate a Gemini-powered chat experiences with PayPal's commerce capabilities.

Amazon also earlier this month announced testing an AI shopping agent it calls Buy for Me.

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