Dive Brief:

• The digital payments company PayPal Holdings and card network Mastercard are building on their longtime ties to advance agentic shopping options by integrating the former’s digital wallet with the latter’s cards, the companies said in a Monday press release. 
• PayPal will pilot Mastercard’s evolving agentic e-commerce system, testing it with artificial intelligence agents and merchants in the marketplace. 
• “This work will ensure compatibility and interoperability with Mastercard and common agentic protocols, as well as enable AI agent verification and data exchange compatible with recently announced agentic protocols,” the companies said in the release.

Dive Insight:

Companies across the payments ecosystem have been racing to incorporate AI-driven e-commerce agents into their systems so that consumers can command bots to do their shopping, and make payments on their behalf.

Mastercard and PayPal said last month that they’ve been working with Google as well on protocols for the new form of shopping.

They’re not the only ones entering the agentic arena. Mastercard’s larger network rival Visa and the digital payments developer Stripe have also been spooling up agentic plays.

PayPal and Mastercard envision significant uptake. “Hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants globally will be able to participate in agentic commerce experiences, including the millions of Mastercard cards on file across the PayPal platform and the company’s co-branded credit and debit cards,” the release said.

Still, it remains to be seen which types of consumers will be most interested in agentic shopping, and what types of spending will be best suited to the new approach to buying online. There are also new fraud concerns emerging with the technology.