Eye on Merchants: Mastercard Taps AI for Small Businesses; Wizard Works With Stripe on Agentic Commerce

Business use cases for artificial intelligence tools continue to develop, with news from Mastercard Inc. and Stripe Inc. among the latest developments. Mastercard launched its Virtual C-Suite, a service to help small businesses use AI in lieu of a cadre of expensive executives, and Stripe is working with Wizard, an AI agent company, to make adoption of the Agentic Commerce Protocol easier.

Mastercard says its Virtual C-Suite, which it labels an extension of its Agent Suite of service, is meant to help small businesses operate as if they had access to the executives larger organizations are accustomed to. Small businesses can access virtual renditions of chief financial, information and security, marketing, and operating officers, it says.

Virtual C-Suite brings artificial intelligence utilities into many of the accounting systems, business software, and banking applications SMBs use, though Mastercard has not disclosed which applications are compatible with its Web site and says capabilities are in development.

“Our goal is to turn operational complexity into clarity—helping entrepreneurs regain time, make smarter decisions, and translate their ambition into measurable growth,” Mark Barnett, Mastercard global head of small and medium enterprises, says in a statement.

Moving on to larger merchants, Wizard, which launched its AI Shopping Agent in February, says it is working with processor Stripe Inc. to advance adoption of the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open-source standard developed by Stripe and OpenAI. The ACP enables conversations between buyers, their AI agents, and businesses to complete a purchase, OpenAI says.

New York City-based Wizard says it is one of Stripe’s early partners to broaden adoption of ACP. It will work with Stripe to make merchant onboarding easier and help retailers convert AI-driven discovery of their products into sales.

Numerous other companies have made the agentic commerce protocol standard, with Google, Visa Inc., and Mastercard among them.