Mastercard Agent Pay: AI gets a license to spend

Welcome to Inside the Circles, your scoop on the people, tech and trends shaping the digital economy and beyond. 

Generative AI is already enabling virtual shopping sprees. Soon it will pick up the tab, too.  

Meet Mastercard Agent Pay, a new technology that integrates payments securely and seamlessly with gen AI chatbots, enabling them to pay for online purchases on a cardholder’s behalf. Using gen AI to personalize a search for a party dress? Based on a customer’s preferences and feedback, the AI agent can curate a selection, purchase the perfect option and even recommend the best way to pay. In the B2B world, a company can harness its AI agent to source supplies, optimize payment terms and manage logistics, even across borders.  

The company announced today it is collaborating with Microsoft and other leading AI platforms on these use cases and more. “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,” says Jorn Lambert , Mastercard’s chief product officer.   

Mastercard Agent Pay will be guided by the company’s commitment to responsible AI, ensuring payments made within these platforms are safe and transparent before, during and after purchase, and protected using Agentic Tokens, which build upon Mastercard’s tokenization tech that today powers and secures mobile contactless payments and more. Read more about agentic commerce here.  

The digital economy’s promise 

In his annual letter to shareholders, CEO Michael Miebach talked about Mastercard’s work to grow the digital economy by bringing new ways to pay to more places. For instance, he said, contactless payments were mostly a novelty in the early 2000s but now represent about 70% of the company’s in-person transactions.  

Looking ahead, he described a future of payments that’s influenced by faster payment movements, harder-to-hack biometric authentication and AI agents that will add automation and personalization for consumers. 

Read the full annual letter here. 

Trust, tech and opportunity 

Leaders from the public and private sector, artists and activists, historians and futurists convened last week in Washington, D.C., for the annual Global Inclusive Growth Summit, organized by Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth, to explore new ways to build a more resilient world. Top of mind: cyber protection for small businesses, the circular economy and responsible AI innovation.  

“Guardrails and governance are seen as dirty words, but I truly believe that it is absolutely essential to make all the use cases you're talking about real,” said Navrina Singh , CEO and founder of Credo AI. “So when you think about all these amazing applications, whether it's in agriculture or whether it's in productivity, at the end of the day, we need to get to a place where not only humans can trust artificial intelligence, but with agentic AI, you can actually make sure that the AI agents are trusting other AI agents." More insights are here.  

IDinsight, a nonprofit that won a $200,000 grant from the Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Inclusion Challenge, created by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and DataDotOrg , is using AI to empower remote health care workers in Ethiopia, with the potential to lower maternal mortality rates and diagnose diseases earlier. Read more about its partnership with Last Mile Health and the Federal Ministry of Health Ethiopia here.  

For more on building long-term financial health, read the Mastercard Economic Institute’s new report on how secondhand clothing is gaining market share. 

By the numbers 

$41.6 billion 

The value of global chargebacks is expected to grow 23% from $33.79 billion in 2025 to $41.69 billion in 2028, according to a new global assessment of the space sponsored by Ethoca , a Mastercard company. As chargebacks — the process by which cardholders dispute transactions — surge, traditional dispute processes are struggling to keep up, with more businesses interested in automated tools and AI learning models to eliminate friction and improve the digital customer experience. Read more in the report.  

The last word 

"We are demonstrating that profitable businesses can simultaneously be good neighbors — that business success and community well-being are fundamentally connected." 

— Mastercard’s Ellen Jackowski and Tara Maguire, in a Mastercard Newsroom blog post about the company’s recent investments in energy-efficient infrastructure to increase resiliency, lower impact on the environment and reduce grid strain.  

ICYMI 

Stable and spendable: Mastercard is helping mainstream stablecoins with new capabilities and powerful partnerships — among them, OKX and Nuvei to make it as easy for people to pay with stablecoins as with the money in their bank accounts, and giving merchants the option to receive their payments in stablecoins. Read more about it here.  

Fintech in the fast lane: The latest cohort of Start Path, Mastercard’s startup engagement program, features a specialized set of startups driving the future of urban transportation: @LetMePark, which streamlines parking and charging payments for connected cars in one app; UbiRider , which seamlessly integrates transportation management, contactless payments, real-time payment processing and data analytics into a single system; and Asistobe , which uses AI insights to decode why people move to shape tomorrow's mobility infrastructures.