Mastercard is expanding its push into AI-powered commerce with Agent Connect, a platform designed to connect merchants, AI shopping agents, digital platforms and payment providers through a single integration. While merchants maintain control over price, branding, and customer relations, the technology enables AI agents to assist customers in finding goods, creating carts, and completing consumer-authorized payments.
Agent Connect is designed to reduce the need for merchants to create separate connections for different AI platforms. Businesses can use their existing product catalogues to provide current prices, product information and availability to AI-driven shopping services.
The platform covers more than just product discovery. Mastercard says its broader Agent Suite for Merchants supports product searches, comparisons, recommendations and checkout through merchant-controlled digital channels. Businesses can also use AI agents to assist with order tracking, refunds and returns.
The next front door to commerce may be an AI agent.
Today, we’re introducing Mastercard Agent Connect and expanding Agent Suite for Merchants to help businesses build, connect, and scale AI-powered shopping experiences.
Learn more about how we’re powering the future of commerce… pic.twitter.com/VE1OvdRue4— Mastercard (@Mastercard) September 9, 2026
Agent Connect is being positioned by the firm as a means for retailers to engage in the developing AI purchasing economy without relinquishing control over their online stores. As customers start utilizing AI assistants to look for things and make judgments about what to buy, that might become more crucial.
AI agents are altering how customers engage with companies, according to Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert, and merchants should maintain control over the buying experience while this change occurs.
Mastercard is also working with Anthropic on commerce tools. Merchants can use Anthropic’s commerce-agent blueprint with Claude models alongside Mastercard’s payment capabilities, allowing businesses to build AI shopping agents that can connect product discovery with authorised purchases.
Another part of Mastercard’s strategy is Agent Pay, which allows AI agents to make payments when customers have authorised them. The system uses tokenised permission to verify that an AI agent has approval to make a purchase.
Mastercard has also introduced Agent Pay for Machines, which is aimed at automatic transactions between software applications. The system is designed to support small and recurring payments, including transactions made using cards or stablecoins.
More than 30 companies are supporting Mastercard’s machine-payment initiative. Participants include Stripe, Coinbase, Adyen, Checkout, Cloudflare, OKX and Global Payments. The partnerships show that Mastercard is seeking to build an ecosystem around machine-to-machine payments rather than relying only on traditional card transactions.
The broader shift could have important implications for digital payments. Today, consumers normally browse a website or app, select products and manually complete a checkout process. AI agents could increasingly handle several of those steps on behalf of users, provided they have permission to act.
That creates a new requirement for payment networks: they need to know not only who is paying but also whether an AI agent is authorised to make the payment. Mastercard’s tokenised-permission approach is designed to address that issue.
The company is continuing to expand the technology through partnerships and merchant testing. It is positioning Agent Connect alongside its existing payment network as AI-driven commerce develops.
For merchants, the attraction is relatively straightforward. Instead of building separate technical connections with every AI shopping platform, they could use a single integration while maintaining control over their products, prices, brand and customer relationships.
The development also shows how the boundaries between AI, payments and digital assets are beginning to overlap. While Mastercard remains a traditional payments company, its support for stablecoin-based machine payments indicates that blockchain-based assets could become part of the infrastructure supporting automated commerce.
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