AI agents are shopping like never before—and tools like Mastercard’s ‘Pay for Machines’ could turbocharge the trend

It’s been a busy few weeks for AI agents. They’ve been rummaging around bank accounts, hacking crypto wallets and, according to MIT researchers, using their spare time to play. The agents have also been on an unprecedented shopping spree. We’ve known for some time that so-called agentic commerce would become a thing—but that moment is arriving far sooner, and on a scale that few anticipated.

“What we’re witnessing is a bit of a turning point. We think it’s accelerating…We’re rapidly getting to something that will see real adoption,” Mastercard’s Head of Product, Jorn Lambert, told me last week.

According to Lambert, this lift-off is due to the sudden popularity of mass-market personal agents. He explained that, a year ago, he and other industry leaders believed that MCP and ACP—agent-to-agent communication protocols that require a degree of technical skill—would be the pillars for agentic commerce, but that this assumption has already become outdated. Instead, the adoption curve has been flattened thanks to products like Muse from Meta and OpenAI’s Dots.

The upshot is there is now a critical mass of consumers eager to send their agents to the digital mall. To ensure they have something to buy, Mastercard has rolled out a tool called “Agent Pay” that makes it easy for Muse and his friends to carry out transactions not just with retailers, but also government services, including parking tickets.

In another intriguing move, Mastercard last week revealed a tool that lets small-business users spin up ad campaigns. I’m not in the habit of plugging credit card companies but, if you have a moment, check out this YouTube video that shows the maker of some sort of granola bar giving her agent a $400 budget to build and execute a social media campaign. This budget covers not just paying TikTok or Instagram, but also acquiring images, music, a script, and other creative elements—a process that would have once taken hours of the granola bar monger’s time, but can now be dispatched in minutes.

A significant feature of Mastercard’s tool (Visa and AmEx are presumably building similar products) is it’s all built on x402, a payments protocol that was baked into the original specs for the internet, but never got built until Coinbase resurrected it a few years ago. As Mastercard’s Lambert explained to me, x402 is basically a messaging language that can speak credit card or debit card or stablecoin—or whatever form of payment both parties to the transaction agree upon. Best of all, x402 is open source, meaning anyone can use or build upon it.

Another significant element of Agent Pay is that it opens the door to micropayments—a term that describes paying a trifling amount like 27¢ or $1.87 online. Until now, digital merchants and financial networks have shunned such payments as impractical, due in part to processing costs. But now, with stablecoins and agents who don’t mind haggling over whether a piece of data should cost 50¢ or 75¢, we’re likely to see more à la carte micro-offerings in place of every webpage making an irritating demand to buy a monthly subscription to access content.

It’s always perilous trying to predict how new technology will be adopted, since our instinct is often to use the new tech—in this case AI agents—to do what we’ve always done before. A classic example is when newspaper publishers treated the internet as a place to post PDF copies of their paper. In the case of agents, what’s likely to happen is that a whole range of unforeseen use cases will emerge that change how we shop and design businesses in the first place.

Indeed, Mastercard’s Lambert predicts that tools like Agent Pay will spur a wealth of new businesses founded by college kids tinkering in their dorm rooms. Bring it on.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com