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The artificial-intelligence boom in payments is rushing on, with two major players going further along the AI commerce road.
Mastercard Inc., having announced Mastercard Agent Pay earlier this year, has launched its Agent Pay Acceptance Framework. This service begins with registering and verifying AI agents before they are allowed to transact on the Mastercard network, the card brand says. This is important because consumers can use AI agents to shop for goods and make purchases using a technology called agentic commerce.
Mastercard says each AI agent is uniquely identified before being enabled to access its network. It uses agentic tokens, which are dynamic and cryptographically secure credentials that make each transaction traceable and authenticated.
Trusted agents, once verified, will be able to use existing checkout forms on e-commerce sites by submitting a dynamic token-verification code, an agentic token formatted for standard payment card fields, Mastercard says. This eliminates the need for a merchant to adopt new programming code and makes agentic commerce available to merchants of all sizes, it says.
Other data elements of the framework include visibility into the consumer’s intent—such as cart contents, transaction limits, and validity windows—and consumer identity, which merchants can use to personalize the transaction by identifying returning consumers in agent-mediated environments.
Mastercard says the framework is part of its effort to foster an industrywide protocol for agentic commerce, such as working with Cloudflare Inc., a cloud-computing connectivity provider. Visa Inc. also is working with Cloudflare.
In related news, retail giant Walmart says it will enable Walmart.com shoppers to use Instant Checkout from ChatGPT to make purchases. AI engine ChatGPT announced Instant Checkout last month as an iteration of agentic commerce. It enables ChatGPT users in the United States to use AI agents shopping on their behalf to make purchases directly from sellers. The first merchant was crafting marketplace Etsy. Walmart’s use of Instant Checkout dramatically expands that reach.
Walmart says this move goes beyond the traditional search bar common in Web browsers to bring more personalized, contextual, and multimedia-enabled interactions. “AI will learn and predict customers’ needs, turning shopping from a reactive experience into a proactive one—what Walmart calls agentic commerce,” Walmart says.
Walmart launched an AI assistant tool called Sparky in June. “We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI,” Doug McMillon, Walmart president and chief executive, says in a statement.
