AI agents are shopping like never before—and tools like Mastercard’s ‘Pay for Machines’ could turbocharge the trend
Source: Fortune ·
The sudden emergence of personal agents like Muse is a "turning point" for agentic commerce, Mastercard's Head of Product says.
From the source
It’s been a busy few weeks for AI agents. They’ve been rummaging around bank accounts, hacking crypto wallets and, according to MIT researchers, using their spare time to play. The agents have also been on an unprecedented shopping spree. We’ve known for some time that so-called agentic commerce would become a thing—but that moment is arriving far sooner, and on a scale that few anticipated. “What we’re witnessing is a bit of a turning point. We think it’s accelerating…We’re rapidly getting to something that will see real adoption,” Mastercard’s Head of Product, Jorn Lambert, told me last week. According to Lambert, this lift-off is due to the sudden popularity of mass-market personal agents. He explained that, a year ago, he and other industry leaders believed that MCP and ACP—agent-to-agent communication protocols that require a degree of technical skill—would be the pillars for agentic commerce, but that this assumption has already become outdated. Instead, the adoption curve has…