Mastercard's AI agent-led pay awaits approval: Top executive

Mastercard's ‘first fully authenticated agentic commerce transaction’ in India, which refers to an AI-driven purchase requiring no human input, was a controlled sandbox demonstration rather than a live commercial rollout, a top company executive told ET.

A commercial rollout of such a technology hinges on regulatory clarity, which Mastercard’s India and South Asia President Gautam Aggarwal said was expected over the next few months.

He said the payments during the showcase were live on real systems and real cards, but merchants were connected through sandbox environments as no Indian platform is yet fully embedded into an AI agent ecosystem.


"The payment was real, but the commerce side was still controlled," he said.

The timeline for commercial rollout will depend on whether regulators treat agent-led payments as extensions of already approved technologies such as tokenisation and passkeys or require fresh approvals.

"If no fresh approvals are needed, it could be a matter of a few months. If new clearances are required, it could take longer," Aggarwal said.

He stressed that agentic commerce is rail-agnostic and can operate across cards or UPI, making it particularly relevant for India where both payment methods have wide adoption. "This is not about the payment method. It is about automating the entire commerce journey," he said.

On security, Aggarwal said agent-led transactions rely on the same safeguards already used in digital payments. "We are not introducing any new technology. The transactions are as secure as what consumers use today. The real change is building trust in the agent," he explained.

India's ability to scale digital innovations rapidly makes it well placed to adopt agentic commerce, with e-commerce, payments and banking likely to lead early usage, he noted.

He said Mastercard is comfortable becoming the invisible infrastructure behind AI-driven transactions. "We already operate as plumbing in the system, and plumbing is where the scale will be in the future," Aggarwal said, signalling the company's long-term bet on powering commerce in the background rather than owning the consumer interface.