A Mastercard report, built on the company’s research and insights from four leading futurists working in the United States, Europe and Asia, examines how everyday life could look from a payments perspective by the end of the decade. The report is titled "Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments."
One of the report’s central findings is that AI-based agents may soon become part of daily life: these agents will be able to haggle over prices, process large amounts of data in seconds, evaluate company claims and customer reviews, make decisions based on that information and complete purchases on behalf of users.
Magnus Lindkvist, the report’s lead futurist, predicts that by 2030 shopping will mean something different: “AI agents will handle routine purchases, while shopping becomes something we do for discovery, inspiration and experience.”
Survey data: teenagers adopt AI faster
Mastercard’s latest research surveyed 26,000 parents and 13–18-year-old teenagers across 13 countries to measure consumer attitudes. The study finds that today’s teens rely on AI to support shopping decisions roughly twice as often as their parents do, and they adopt AI-enabled shopping tools more quickly.
Key findings from the survey include:
- 62% of young people believe AI will significantly change how their generation shops in the future.
- 27% of teenagers say they would likely use a fully AI-operated shopping assistant that recommends products, chooses between options and completes purchases according to user-set rules.
- 31% of teenagers would trust an AI recommendation more than a friend’s, and 23% would follow AI advice over their parents’ opinions.
- 67% of surveyed parents think AI-based shopping will be defining for their children’s generation, while only 5% believe AI will play a similarly defining role for their own generation.
Implications for retailers
The report emphasizes that AI agents create a new kind of “shopper”: an entity capable of machine-scale evaluation and autonomous transactions. Retailers will need to adapt loyalty programs, customer engagement practices and digital interfaces to meet the needs of AI agents as well as human consumers.
Practically, this means product information, claims and policies must be machine-readable. For example, a sustainability claim will need an identifiable certification that an AI agent can find, read and verify.
Mastercard warns that AI-agent-driven commerce could be the deepest change yet: people will move from using technology for information and decision support to delegating the decision itself to machines.
Live examples: pilot AI-agent payments in Europe and Hungary
Although the report looks ahead to 2030, early examples of agent-led commerce already exist. Earlier this year, Mastercard and its partners completed Europe’s first live, end-to-end agent payment transaction, demonstrating how AI agents can securely support purchasing and payment flows while maintaining security, transparency and consumer-control guarantees.
In Hungary, Mastercard, together with OTP Bank, executed the country’s first live, authenticated AI-agent transaction in May. The initiative has since attracted the participation of Gránit Bank, MBH Bank and K&H Bank, strengthening the pilot.
Conclusion
The Mastercard report and accompanying survey suggest that AI agents could substantially reshape the logic of shopping and payments over the coming years: routine purchases may become automated while people focus more on discovery and experience. For retailers and financial institutions this implies new operational and technical requirements, particularly around transparent, machine-readable product data and certifications.
