No more window switching: Mastercard’s Agent Pay transforms how enterprises use AI search

One criticism of computer use platforms and other search agents is that you cannot complete any transactions within the same window if you use them to find a product or a hotel. 

Mastercard aims to change that by integrating AI companies and platforms into its payments network, enabling users and enterprises to transact seamlessly within their respective ecosystems. Today the company announced Agent Pay, a new payments program that brings the Mastercard payments system to AI chat platforms. 

Greg Ulrich, Mastercard’s chief data and AI officer, told VentureBeat in an interview that Agent Pay “closes the loop” on agentic search. 

“You want to close the loop within the experience to enable the customer experience in the most effective way possible, which is what we’re trying to enable today,” Ulrich said. “You have to make sure that everybody in the ecosystem can identify the agents and authenticate the agent to handle the transaction safely and securely.”

OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity can join Mastercard’s payments network, allowing other network participants — merchants, card users and financial institutions — to trust the platform’s transactions and check for any potential fraud. It also enables Mastercard to bring its fraud and transaction dispute systems to those companies. 

Mastercard partnered with Microsoft, IBM, Braintree, and Checkout.com to scale Agent Pay, orchestrate the system and enhance other features for merchants.  It will also integrate Agent Pay with banks and other financial institutions. 

Making agent searches more useful

Over the past year, we’ve seen AI-powered search evolve from simply listing information to actively using your computer on your behalf. These platforms enable users to ask AI models to search the internet for any information. It can offer recommendations for products or places to visit. AI search has proved popular. 

This week, OpenAI even announced it’s adding shopping features to ChatGPT search, running on GPT-4o, in a bid to compete with Google’s long-standing dominance in product search. 

However, users have always found that they need to open a separate window if they see a deal. 

“We’re gonna work with the AI platform and agents so that they can get onboarded and can access the technology. But on the merchant side, they can do now things to recognize these transactions and more effectively manage the risk around this,” said Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez.

Bringing these platforms into a payments system like Mastercard makes them more useful, as they can serve not only as a place where people find information, but also as a platform where users can find and transact. 

When AI companies are part of the payment network, it could also improve any agentic workflow built by enterprises. Imagine an agentic workflow that includes searching for new suppliers, finding a suitable supplier, helping with negotiations, drafting a contract and setting up transactions through the platform. 

The company is discussing the integration of Agent Pay into Microsoft’s Copilot and Azure/OpenAI services. 

Tokens rather than AI 

Agent Pay, however, is not based on generative AI, even though Mastercard does leverage the technology for other products. 

Agent Pay relies on the company’s tokenization technology, which utilizes cryptography to help mask personally identifiable information (PII) during digital transactions.

“It’s a separate number that is useless if it’s not used within the context of the transaction that you authorized,” Fourez said. “That’s achieved through cryptography that makes the transactions each transaction unique, and if someone else gets this information, they can’t do anything with it.” 

Mastercard utilizes generative AI and large language models for fraud detection, which Ulrich noted works in tandem with tokenization for Agent Pay, as its AI models verify transactions for fraud once they are initiated. 

Ulrich added Agent Pay lets every company and person involved in the transaction trust that “rules work in this ecosystem.”

“We’re making sure that we safely and securely identify these players in the ecosystem, that we have a way to capture and hold the credentials securely,” he said.