TLDR: Visa and Mastercard are actively developing and launching AI-powered spending agents, marking a significant shift towards integrating artificial intelligence into financial transactions. These new platforms, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, aim to enable AI to initiate payments and manage various financial tasks on behalf of consumers and businesses.
In a significant leap towards the future of financial transactions, payment industry titans Visa and Mastercard are in a fervent race to roll out their respective AI-powered spending agents. This strategic push underscores a profound integration of artificial intelligence into the core of financial operations, promising to redefine how consumers and businesses interact with their money.
Visa has unveiled its “Intelligent Commerce” platform, designed to facilitate AI-driven transactions. The company is already collaborating with over 30 partners in testing phases, including major AI innovators such as Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Samsung. Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, emphasized the company’s commitment to fostering AI platform participation and supporting novel payment methods. This initiative aims to embed Visa deeper into the commerce infrastructure, leveraging its extensive network to enable agentic commerce.
Similarly, Mastercard is advancing with its “Agent Pay” feature, which utilizes conversational AI to process payments through various channels, including contact centers and messaging applications. CEO Michael Miebach highlighted that agentic artificial intelligence is already assisting businesses in managing payments, describing this evolution as innovation across the stack. Mastercard is also collaborating with Microsoft on new use cases to scale agentic commerce, with plans to engage other leading AI platforms. Both payment giants have also enlisted IBM to aid in the development of their AI payment solutions.
The potential applications for these AI spending agents are vast and transformative. They include AI personal shoppers capable of autonomously searching for and purchasing products at optimal prices, extending beyond single-platform limitations to encompass anything payable via Visa or Mastercard. Beyond automated purchases, the technology could analyze past transaction data to offer personalized recommendations. This trend is already being driven by advertisers and e-commerce companies, even without direct access to financial data.
The shift towards machine-to-machine commerce is gaining momentum, with Google piloting AI agents that shop online. This indicates a future where financial transactions move at “software speed,” bypassing traditional banking rails and enabling seamless cross-border payments, treasury operations, and payroll solutions. Mastercard’s real-time fraud prevention and PayPal’s predictive recommendations, along with generative AI copilots for banks, exemplify how AI is enhancing both back-end efficiency and front-end customer experience.
Also Read:
- AWS: AI-Powered Payments Revolutionizing Finance Today, Not Tomorrow
- E-commerce Giants Implement Measures to Restrict AI Shopping Agents
While the adoption of agentic AI systems by enterprises faces skepticism due to concerns about implementation risks, oversight challenges, and unproven ROI, industry leaders believe that user-friendly traceability, human-in-the-loop safeguards, and built-in bias monitoring will be crucial in building trust. The development of these AI agents signifies a pivotal moment, positioning Visa and Mastercard not just as payment processors but as technology and data-driven innovation partners at the forefront of the AI revolution in finance.
