Mastercard Now Lets AI Agents To Pay Your Bills

May 22, 2025

In partnership with

75% of Shoppers Won’t Look Past Amazon’s First Page—Are You There Yet?

In 2025, beating your competitors on Amazon requires effective external traffic strategies. Stack Influence uses advanced AI and a dedicated community to effortlessly automate thousands of micro-influencer collaborations monthly. Top brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and MaryRuth Organics use Stack Influence to drive external traffic, create authentic user-generated content (UGC), and dramatically scale recurring revenue—often seeing increases up to 13X in just two months.

Forget negotiating influencer fees. Pay only with products and receive full rights to impactful images and videos created by influencers. Fully automated management means you achieve top Amazon rankings without lifting a finger.

Outrank your competitors and dominate your niche in 2025 with Stack Influence.

Grow smarter: Reallocate ad spend, boost ROAS with affiliates

Ad spend keeps climbing. ROAS? Not so much.

The smartest Amazon sellers aren’t spending more—they’re spending smarter.

The Affiliate Shift Calculator models what could happen if you reallocated a portion of your ad budget into affiliate marketing.

Built for sellers doing $5M+ on Amazon.

Key Takeaways

  • Launched in late April 2025, Mastercard's Agent Pay enables AI agents to securely pay bills and make purchases on behalf of users, using "Mastercard Agentic Tokens" built on existing tokenization technology for enhanced security and transparency.

  • AI agents must be registered and verified, with consumers retaining full control over authorized transactions, supported by Mastercard’s fraud detection and on-device biometric authentication to ensure safe bill payments.

  • Agent Pay streamlines bill payments and commerce by allowing AI to handle tasks like recurring expenses or cross-border transactions, reducing friction and enhancing personalized payment experiences.

Online shopping has become second nature for most of us, but what if you did not have to shop at all? Now, AI can handle it for you.

Imagine telling your AI assistant, "Find me the best deal on sneakers, buy them, and pay with my card." You go about your day, and your AI does the rest safely and instantly.

That said, Mastercard has launched a new program called “Agent Pay,” which uses artificial intelligence to help customers browse, decide, and even make purchases on their behalf.

What Is Mastercard’s Agent Pay?

On April 29th, 2025, Mastercard recently launched Agent Pay, a new service that lets AI agents shop and make payments for consumers and businesses through conversational platforms.

The program builds on Mastercard's existing tokenization technology to embed secure personalized payment options directly into AI-driven recommendations and insights.

Notably, Agent Pay introduces Mastercard agentic tokens, which extend the company's proven tokenization capabilities currently used in mobile contactless payments, card-on-file (CoF) services, and pass keys to agentic commerce, where AI agents handle transactions with trust and security.

By registering and verifying trusted AI agents, the payments giant ensures that each transaction is identified as agent-facilitated, giving consumers complete visibility and control over their purchases.

Mastercard announced a partnership with Microsoft to integrate Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio into Agent Pay. The company plans to expand collaborations with leading AI platforms and will work with IBM's watsonx Orchestrate for B2B use cases, and will collaborate with payment enablers like Braintree and Checkout.com to enhance tokenization support at merchant checkouts.

How Does It Work?

In an interview with CBS News, William Antonelli, a tech reporter and contributor at Business Insider, easily explains how AI can browse for the perfect outfit, book a flight, order groceries, and then pay securely without ever exposing your real card number:

“What Mastercard is essentially doing is that companies that want to run their own AI agents that can do tasks for you online like shopping, are going to be able to work with Mastercard. So, for example, if you tell your AI agent, ‘Go buy me some eggs,’ and you want to use your Mastercard, it will be less likely that the company you buy eggs from marks it as fraud, because now they have a direct signature from Mastercard saying, ‘Hey, we're cool with this. This AI can use this card. We're all in on that.’ It's essentially like Mastercard is now giving the AI a voucher, in a way. It's being able to say, ‘We approve this—go ahead.’”

Any Privacy And Security Concerns?

Antonelli was then asked about what customers were giving up in exchange:

“Right now, when you use an AI agent, one of the big struggles is that you constantly have to keep stopping to enter your credit card information, because the AI does not necessarily know that. In the future, what they're saying is you'll be able to give your payment information directly to the AI. The AI will be able to accomplish all the tasks and go through the whole checkout process. And so the question ‘What are you giving up?’ might just be your payment details. Companies like Mastercard, Visa—generally, we do trust them with our payment details. But as we know, AI is an untested technology in so many ways.”

Final Thoughts

As you can see, the online shopping industry, or e-commerce, is changing every day as new technologies are integrated into our shopping experiences, making them more seamless and intuitive. AI is revolutionizing how we shop by providing personalized recommendations, predicting our needs, and even assisting us in making better purchasing decisions.

As Visa, PayPal, and Amazon all roll out their agentic commerce offerings, Mastercard’s move creates a broader industry shift towards seamless AI-powered shopping and payments.