Agentic commerce needs to build trust among both consumers and merchants to scale, Mastercard said in a Tuesday (Sept. 15) press release highlighting some takeaways from a recent executive roundtable convened by Mastercard and PYMNTS.
Held at Mastercard’s New York City Tech Hub and moderated by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, the roundtable brought together about three dozen representatives of tech, merchants, issuers and other major actors in eCommerce to discuss the effects of agentic artificial intelligence.
Several participants suggested that merchants can build trust in agentic commerce among consumers by offering the same sort of open communications they use with eCommerce, including the communication and expectation management provided to customers after the order is placed, according to the release.
Building trust in agentic commerce among merchants will require easing their concerns that the technology will cause them to lose control of the shopping experience, Gaurang Shah, Mastercard’s executive vice president of Global Acceptance and Merchant Services, said in the release. Mastercard has solved this issue by designing its agentic capabilities to give merchants control over agents’ interactions with brands, products and customers.
Highlighting another takeaway from the event, Mastercard said that participants agreed that it will take years for a large-scale shift to agentic commerce to unfold. Opinions differed on what kinds of businesses will benefit most from the technology, with some participants saying it may drive shoppers to familiar retail names, and others saying it could introduce them to new retailers, per the release.
Mastercard also pointed to data from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Will the 2026 Shopping Season Go Agentic?,” which found that about 50% of American adults have bought something at retail with the help of AI, and 22% now begin online retail search in an AI tool.
PYMNTS shared another conversation from the agentic roundtable event on Monday (Sept. 14). In that report, Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of digital commercialization at Mastercard, said that Amazon’s Buy For Me feature and Google’s AI Mode are examples of agentic purchases that are happening now.
