Mastercard Report Says AI Agents Could Reshape Shopping and Payments by 2030

Mastercard released a report on September 8, 2026, examining how AI agents may begin searching, comparing, deciding, and transacting on behalf of users. According to ChainCatcher, the report argues that trust, transparency, and safeguards will become the foundation of agentic commerce. The report analyzes commerce from three angles: how AI agents could change the shopping experience and accelerate the shift from manual action to delegation; how agentic commerce may affect retailers, customer relationships, and competition; and how payment, identity, authorization, and trust infrastructure may evolve to support autonomous transactions. It also cites several futurists’ views on the next phase of commerce. Patrick Dixon said websites that take more than three seconds to load could lose more than 80% of sales by 2030. Theodora Lau said trust in an agentic world is a property of machine-readable terms. Katja Forbes said the biggest customer by 2030 could be an agent network with an internal organizational structure. Magnus Lindkvist said the future of commerce will be defined by systems people trust enough to delegate to.