Visa and Mastercard want AI to do your online shopping for you
Giants of the swipe-tap-insert ecosystem are looking for bot assistance to maintain their grip on global payments.
In the announcement for its new “Agent Pay” product on Tuesday, Mastercard envisaged a world where a 29-year-old woman enlists the help of one of its chatbots to pick out her 30th birthday party outfit and accessories, based on “her style, the venue’s ambience, and weather forecast.”
But if you only have a card provided by the other giant of the payment world — don’t panic! Similarly life-changing features were announced from Visa just one day later, with the company unveiling “a new era of commerce” with its Visa Intelligence Commerce initiative on Wednesday.
While both products will rely pretty heavily on existing AI agent tech and models from companies like Microsoft, IBM, Anthropic, and OpenAI, the timing of the announcements is a pretty telling sign of where the powers that be in the payments landscape think e-commerce is heading.
The swipe economy
For decades, Visa and Mastercard have been the main highways of the payments world, facilitating some 4 trillion transactions between them since 2010 — and taking a healthy toll for themselves with every swipe and tap.
The two card juggernauts handled ~65% of the estimated 724 billion global card transactions in 2023, even as rivals like UnionPay in China continue to gain ground.
The timing of the two announcements may do little to assuage concerns that the dominance of the two companies is tantamount to a duopoly — especially in the domestic US market, where they controlled some 80% of the market last year, per data from Nilson Report. Indeed, regulators are beginning to push back on their supremacy in the US, with the DOJ suing Visa last September.
