During Mastercard’s recent third quarter earnings call, CEO Michael Miebach said the company has entered into a broad strategic partnership with OpenAI covering agentic commerce, payment technology and AI adoption.
The agreement includes Mastercard’s Agent Pay technology, which enables AI agents to initiate transactions on behalf of consumers. It also covers opportunities to expand payment services and apply AI-based automation across Mastercard’s operations.
Agentic commerce enables AI agents to discover products, evaluate purchasing options and complete transactions with limited human intervention. The emerging model presents opportunities for both consumer e-commerce and business-to-business transactions.
“It is still early days, and the numbers are not yet significant in the grand scheme,” Miebach said.
Mastercard is developing several technologies to support agent-initiated transactions. Agent Pay uses tokenization to protect payment credentials and verify buyer authorization, while Verifiable Intent records the buyer’s instructions. Agentic Trust Intelligence helps financial institutions and merchants assess AI-initiated transactions, and Agent Connect supports merchant participation.
Miebach said Shopify’s Shop Pay is among the first major implementations of Agent Pay, using network tokens to secure transactions across multiple agentic platforms.
Mastercard also expects AI-driven commerce to increase demand for fraud prevention, identity verification and cybersecurity services as financial institutions adapt to transactions initiated by autonomous software agents.