Visa and Mastercard launch AI driven online commerce offerings

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to permeate just about everything. Now, payments giants Visa and Mastercard have come up with offerings that enable AI agents - think of them as one step up from bots, to do some online tasks independently - to shop for you, in fact.

Mastercard's offering is called Shopping Muse. It uses generative AI (GenAI) and is based on what Mastercard-acquired Dynamic Yield has built with its AffinityML (machine learning) tech.

"Conversational commerce meets cutting-edge personalisation" is the slogan, with the idea being that the virtual assistant acts like a shopping buddy who provides recommendations. There's image recognition, and natural language processing (NLP) like other AI chats.

Shopping Muse is aimed at online retailers with big catalogues, with the recommendations that the AI provides helping customers discover what they actually want to buy; in order to do that, the AI analyses what the shopper is doing on the site, and if logged in, past purchases as well. 

MasterCard has followed up on Shopping Muse with Agent Pay, which is a partnership with Microsoft to let AI pay for things. Here's an example from Mastercard:

This means that for a soon-to-be-30-year-old planning her milestone birthday party, she can now chat with an AI agent to proactively curate a selection of outfits and accessories from local boutiques and online retailers based on her style, the venue’s ambience, and weather forecasts.

Based on her preferences and feedback, the intelligent agent can make the purchase, and also recommend the best way to pay, for example using Mastercard One Credential.

The tech is built on the back of tokenisation which is when you don't disclose card information directly during transactions. Instead, the system creates a random, unique token that is used in transactions instead of the actual card details.

Mastercard Payments Passkeys that use biometric data for authentication (fingerprints and facial scans) or a personal identification number (PIN) instead of passwords, are also part of the offering.

Not to be outdone by Mastercard, rival Visa is launching its "Intelligent Commerce" and uses Agentic AI. This features AI shopping assistants that users are meant to delegate their buying to.

Now, depending on where you stand on these things, Agentic AI is either amazing or deeply disturbing technology.

The general idea is that Agentic AI can be autonomous, and work tasks with minimal human intervention. 

That is, Agentic AI doesn't need to be prompted all the time, and follow rules given to it. Instead, the technology is meant to be able to independently plan things, make decisions, and even change tack if the environment does that too, so as to adapt to it.

Visa is working with Microsoft, OpenAI, IBM, Mistral AI, Perplexity AI, Samsung and online payments company Stripe for its Intelligent Commerce.

Given that both Mastercard and Visa are heading down the AI shopping route, it'll be one to watch. If shoppers like it, and aren't put off by a machine helping them to decide and to pay - and for the latter, no AI hallucinations can be allowed - it's going to be difficult for E-Commerce developers and sites to avoid the tech.

Are you ready to hand over your shopping decisions to AI?