Visa and Mastercard are betting that agentic commerce will multiply the number of payments that consumers make for purchases by taking humans out of the equation.

Chief financial officers for each of the card networks cited that reasoning last week at JPMorgan’s Global Technology, Media, and Communications Conference when they discussed shopping that may be driven by artificial intelligence in the future.  

The thinking goes like this: While humans may be inclined to purchase numerous items from one retailer because it’s more convenient to do one transaction, an AI-driven bot will be more likely to buy items from several merchants in multiple transactions if doing so better satisfies parameters specified by a shopper.

Payments players across the industry acknowledge that agentic commerce isn’t likely to arrive this year, and maybe not even next year, but they’re laying the groundwork now for what they hope will be a new form of digital buying and payments in the future. 

JPMorgan analyst Tien-tsin Huang, who interviewed the CFOs on stage at the annual conference, noted that Visa and Mastercard have “an important role” to play in “developing the framework.”

It’s “early days” for agentic commerce, but Visa has been working on its plan for agentic commerce for more than a year, the card network’s CFO, Chris Suh, said in his May 19 discussion with Huang. 

Suh acknowledged there’s still plenty of work ahead for all the parties involved, including card issuers, merchants and software developers, with agentic protocols and standards still in the works. 

Mastercard and Visa, as well as tech titan Google, said last month that they’re working with FIDO Alliance, an industry standards organization, to develop the mechanisms by which agents will be authenticated and enabled to transact on behalf of consumers.

San Francisco-based Visa is the largest U.S. card network, and a global payments powerhouse as well, so its influence in developing the new form of payment will hold sway.

“We think it accelerates our opportunity to grow, and it does it in probably four meaningful ways,” Suh explained. These were the four points Suh made:

• Agents “will just create more transactions – we think they'll intelligently split transactions, and for us, transactions are a very important unit of measure in our business.”

• Agentic commerce will further push payments generally in the direction of digitization, with fewer transactions happening in cash or check. 

• The commerce will accelerate business-to-business transactions.

• Overall economic production will increase, spawning more commerce.

“When you add that all up, that's just a bigger pool of opportunity for Visa to go after,” he said.

Purchase, New York-based Mastercard is also counting on agentic commerce for long-term growth, and Mastercard CFO Sachin Mehra echoed some ideas similar to those of his rival CFO when he discussed agentic commerce with Huang the same day.

Mehra noted three ways in which agentic commerce may build up Mastercard’s business: 

• “It creates the potential for multiplication of transactions, and the reason it does is because agents will not necessarily be emotionally attached to shopping from the same merchant [as human beings are] – they will look to find what is the most optimal answer,” Mehra said. Given each transaction yields fees, more transactions means more revenue, he explained.

• Such commerce instigates more transactions between digital agents, as opposed to humans, leads to increased potential need for Mastercard services, such as fraud prevention tools.

• Transactions will require tokenization, a security service provided by the company that protects a card holder’s card information.

At the same time, Mehra suggested agentic payments may not happen as quickly as expected. Mastercard believes the first phase of agentic commerce will be with “human-assisted agentic payments,” before there are fully “autonomous agentic payments,” he said.

He also acknowledged that some existing digital commerce that flows over card rails will simply shift to agentic commerce on those rails, yielding no incremental increase in that case.

Mehra contended that consumers will ultimately determine how agentic commerce takes shape, both with respect to the shopping and payments. “We're not going to pick winners and losers,” he told Huang. “We're going to let consumers decide what is their preferred method of actually shopping.”