Agentic artificial intelligence moved a step closer to real-world commerce last week when Mastercard demonstrated an AI agent in India that located a product and completed the purchase without the user opening an app or manually entering card details.
Presenting at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Mastercard described the transaction as the country’s first fully authenticated agentic commerce payment. The demonstration offered a glimpse of a model in which software agents—using stored payment credentials—can execute purchases on a user’s behalf.
Security Is Paramount
The focus of the exercise was security. Built on Mastercard’s Agent Pay framework, the transaction took place within a controlled environment designed to verify both the user and the AI agent before payment authorization. The goal was to show that AI agent-driven commerce can meet the authentication and fraud prevention standards required for financial transactions.
The emphasis is likely to become even more important as agentic systems expand into B2B use cases, where transaction values are significantly higher and governance requirements more complex.
In comments to Business Today, Nitendra Rajput, Senior Vice President and Head of Mastercard AI Garage, said the company’s approach centers on secure automation and fraud prevention, with strict safeguards and user control built into the payment architecture.
Opportunities in the B2B Market
The broader commercial implications are even stronger. Data from Deloitte projects that agentic AI could reach $17.5 trillion in gross merchandise value by 2030, with the majority—roughly $15 trillion—coming from B2B transactions and roughly purchases, and $2.5 trillion from B2C activity.
“Visa and Mastercard have both been very tech-forward by offering secure payment solutions to authenticate both the buyer and payment credentials in agentic commerce,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “These are important first steps to building the infrastructure that will make agentic commerce viable at scale for both merchants and consumers. While it’s fun to think of shopping bots keeping our pantries stocked, the more interesting application is enterprise B2B purchasing tasks, one of the categories that our research shows will among the first to leverage the power of agentic commerce.”
