Credit card companies are racing to claim a place at the checkout when AI agents start shopping on behalf of consumers—even as shoppers remain skeptical of letting bots spend their money.
Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets people give an AI agent a virtual card and allow it to buy things online without checking in before each purchase. Cardholders can limit how much it spends, restrict which retailers it buys from, or require approval before checkout.
“This is a land grab for infrastructure standards,” Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, told Fortune. “If they set the standards for agentic commerce, they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come.”
Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has also announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed. Similarly, Meta has Muse, which can search for products and navigate checkout, but presents the purchase for the user’s final approval.
It seems, though, that shoppers appear far more interested in using AI to find a deal than letting it pay. Just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide. More than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf.
The features these shoppers valued most were price-drop alerts and comparisons across retailers, each selected by 35% of respondents. Just 18% selected personalized product suggestions.
Still, Mastercard framed its investment as preparation for a change it expects consumers to eventually embrace. “AI is a transformational technology. It’s a matter of when, not if, people use it,” the company told Fortune.
And knowing what happens if a bot buys the wrong thing could help ease consumer hesitancy about AI shopping.
Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to act as a record of who authorized the agent to shop and what the agent was authorized to buy. Mastercard told Fortune that the record could help resolve a dispute if something goes wrong.
The company also said when consumers and merchants use its agentic payment solutions, “the protections you value in a card purchase today would be the same in an agentic-powered transaction.”
But when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent—the record system of the cardholder’s instructions. It did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.
That last step may be the hardest to give up; checking out can be the reward for all the hard work and late hours scrolling on Depop.
“We want to be the ones to make that final click,” Dan Coates, ACI Worldwide’s Product Management Director, told Fortune.