Mastercard Rolls Out Agent Connect for AI Shopping

Mastercard has launched Agent Connect, giving merchants a single integration point to connect with AI shopping agents, digital platforms and payment providers as more consumers turn to digital assistants to find products.

The service targets a shift in how people shop. As AI agents take on a bigger role in product discovery and cart creation, Mastercard wants merchants able to plug into that ecosystem without building a separate technical connection for every AI platform they want to reach.

One Integration for Merchants and AI Agents

Through Agent Connect, businesses can supply current prices, product descriptions and stock information from their existing catalogs, which AI agents then use to search products, assemble a cart and move a shopper toward checkout. Mastercard said the goal is to keep merchants involved throughout that journey, preserving their control over branding, pricing and customer relationships even as AI agents take on a bigger role in the process.

Alongside Agent Connect, Mastercard expanded its Agent Suite for Merchants, adding tools for product discovery and conversational shopping guidance. The company is also working with Anthropic to give merchants access to a commerce agent blueprint built on Claude models, paired with Mastercard's payment infrastructure. The updated suite also covers tasks that come after checkout, including order tracking, refunds and returns.

Agent Pay Keeps Customers in Control

Mastercard introduced Agent Pay to handle purchases that AI agents initiate on a customer's behalf. The system relies on tokenized authorization to confirm a customer's intent before a transaction completes, so an agent cannot approve a purchase without the customer's permission.

Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said AI agents are set to change the buying interface again, and that the company wants merchants to keep control of that interface as it evolves.

Rollout Targets US Market First

The initial rollout targets consumers in the United States and includes partners such as Samsung and Trip.com. Brazilian digital services company Bemobi will also adopt the technology.

Agent Connect builds on work Mastercard began in June, when it launched Agent Pay for Machines, a payment network for automated, low-value transactions between software and connected devices. More than 30 companies support that initiative, including Stripe, Coinbase, Adyen, Checkout.com, Cloudflare and OKX. The push into machine-to-machine payments follows a period in which central banks have warned that AI trading agents operating at scale could pose fresh risks to financial markets, a reminder that autonomous systems handling money, whether trading or shopping, raise similar questions about oversight and control.

Mastercard said artificial intelligence already touches about one third of its services, and Agent Connect extends that push into consumer-facing payments. The company's US subsidiary also holds a New York BitLicense issued in May, supporting its work on stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits, an area Mastercard has been building out since completing its $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK earlier this year. That infrastructure sits alongside a broader industry shift toward stablecoins as a settlement layer for everyday transactions, which Mastercard is now positioning as part of its agentic commerce stack.