Dive Brief:
- Mastercard plans to launch a new suite of agentic tools for business customers by the second-quarter of this year, the company announced Jan. 27.
- Using the software, Mastercard’s business clientele can build, test and implement artificial intelligence-powered agents within their operations. The AI agents are aimed at helping businesses improve their security, payments and customer experience functions as well as catalyze growth, the company said in a press release.
- The company anticipates that AI agents will be integrated into “a significant percentage of customer interactions and operational tasks” by 2030, per the press release.
Dive Insight:
With the upcoming launch of its new AI agents, Mastercard’s agentic AI push continues apace. A week before this latest suite of services was unfurled, the company said in a separate release that it had partnered with Google on a universal commerce protocol from the tech giant that helps AI agents and businesses interoperate.
Mastercard has also worked with tech company OpenAI on an agentic protocol, enabling the card network to work across multiple AI platforms using secure credentials and verifiable agent identities, the company said in its Jan. 20 release.
“It’s no secret that those who lay the groundwork can embrace new commercial opportunities much faster,” Kaushik Gopal, head of insights and intelligence for Mastercard, said in its Agentic Suite press release. “Mastercard Agent Suite builds on our core strengths and capabilities to ensure our customers can be both nimble and practical as they turn innovation into outcomes.”
In addition to Mastercard, other major payments players have been investing in agentic AI capabilities. Last April, Visa said it had been working with tech companies like OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, Mistral AI and Microsoft to facilitate personalized, secure AI commerce to its customers worldwide. Meanwhile, Stripe said it’s collaborating with OpenAI to develop an agentic AI protocol, enabling Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants to transact via ChatGPT.
Mastercard is developing its suite of agentic AI tools as more companies are expected to integrate the technology. A Deloitte report released last month predicts that more companies will adopt AI agents to assist with their operations, including tasks such as managing corporate travel transactions and handling commercial real estate leases or contracts with recurring payments.
As payment providers tout the benefits of their agentic AI tools, some industry insiders have raised concerns that such agents may facilitate fraud. During the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas last year, Mike Lozanoff, global head of merchant services for JPMorgan Chase, questioned whether AI agents could “hallucinate and buy something we didn’t tell it to buy?” Separately, Worldpay’s chief product officer, Cindy Turner, also questioned whether the technology could be exploited by fraudsters.
