The payments giant on Wednesday (Sept. 9) announced it had updated its Mastercard Agent Suite for Merchants, which lets businesses bring “agent-powered shopping experiences” into their eCommerce platforms.
“Consumers are increasingly relying on AI-powered assistants to discover products, compare options and decide what to buy,” the company said in a news release.
“To participate, merchants need product information that AI agents can find, understand and act on. Agent Suite for Merchants lets businesses make merchant-defined information – including product details, pricing, availability and fulfillment options – accessible across models, platforms and agent experiences while maintaining control over how that information is used, represented and acted upon.”
Mastercard introduced Agent Suite in January, designed to help businesses prepare for agentic commerce via services like the company’s AI consulting.
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Meanwhile, Mastercard has debuted Mastercard Agent Connect, a solution designed to help merchants, artificial intelligence (AI) agents, digital platforms and payment providers connect and transact through one integration.
These capabilities will help merchants take part in AI-powered commerce, control over how their products and services are represented, and “support trusted, user-authorized transactions,” Mastercard added.
“With new shopping agent capabilities and access to Agent Connect, Agent Suite for Merchants will help merchants put agentic commerce into practice, prepare product information for AI discovery and connect with participating third-party agents,” the release said.
“Mastercard can also help merchants prepare to support secure agentic transactions with Mastercard Agent Pay.”
Meanwhile, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that merchant investment in agentic commerce centers on building demand, while controlling payments and pricing.
According to those findings, 46% of merchants said pricing and the final price a customer pays are the functions they are least willing to let AI agents handle.
As covered here earlier this week, agentic commerce becomes more complicated as agents become a “negotiating layer” between merchants and consumers, with autonomous buying agents focusing on “the consumer’s economics” by finding a cheaper seller.
“That is why near-term investment thins as AI approaches the transaction itself,” the report added. “Thirty-one percent of merchants plan to invest within a year in automated product search and comparison, compared with 26% for completing checkout on a consumer’s behalf. Nearly half put capabilities such as multi-merchant bundling, autonomous checkout or dispute management into the ‘later or never’ category.”
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