Mastercard: Merchants Seek AI Shoppers But Keep Customer
Mastercard executives say AI agents are discovering products but not yet buying, as merchants seek trust and control in new commerce channels.
Consumers are using AI agents to search and compare products but are stopping short of letting them make purchases. This gap between discovery and transaction is creating a trust and liability challenge for merchants, according to a Mastercard executive.
Gaurang Shah, executive vice president of Global Acceptance and Merchant Solutions at Mastercard, said the searches are already happening. He told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that consumers are experimenting because access is easy, but today they are definitely stopping at the recommendations.
The next generation of agentic payments will need to move more than money. It will need to move proof. Consumers generally expect protection if something goes wrong. Merchants may have a different view of where responsibility should sit when an agent initiates the transaction.
Karen Webster said the consumer has the baseline expectation that they’re protected. Whatever happens, they’re going to be protected. And the merchants feel that liability should rest with whoever the agent broker is. That conflict turns identity, authorization and intent into payments problems.
Merchant Control in the Payments Stack
Shah described the challenge as a trust equation between consumers allowing agents to transact and merchants agreeing to accept those transactions. A merchant needs to know if the agent is legitimate, if the consumer authorized it, what it was permitted to do, and if the transaction stayed within those parameters.
Webster noted consumers already use AI for discovery, ranking, and comparison before returning to familiar sites to buy. This means the customer journey can start migrating away from merchant-owned channels even before merchants formally join agentic commerce.
Shah compared the transition to the arrival of search engines, marketplaces, mobile apps, and eCommerce. Merchants learned to operate across each new layer. But autonomous agents introduce a more consequential intermediary because they can potentially decide which merchant wins the transaction.
Merchants still want to be discoverable, trusted, and transactable, Shah said. But they also want to preserve their direct customer relationships and their ability to differentiate on something other than price.
AI as Another Channel, Not a Replacement
There is a growing indication merchants will resist an all-or-nothing choice between their own digital properties and third-party AI platforms. Shah said merchants he has spoken with generally want both channels.
They want to offer both channels, he said, stressing the importance of meeting customers wherever they are. Merchants want their catalogs available to outside agents while building agentic experiences on their own properties, creating parity on their own channel versus the third-party channel.
Webster distilled the imperative to five words: Be where the consumer is. That matters because the simplest optimization for a shopping agent could also be one of the most destructive for brands: find the cheapest acceptable product.
Agentic commerce therefore creates an emerging battle over what an AI recommendation should optimize for. Price is measurable. Brand equity, service quality, authenticity, loyalty benefits, return experience and consumer preference are harder to encode. Yet those are precisely the variables on which many merchants make their margins.
Search engines once decided what consumers saw. Marketplaces decided where products competed. Social platforms increasingly influenced what shoppers wanted. Agentic platforms could go a step further and decide what gets bought.
