Mastercard exec says AI agents helping you make your next purchase could be key to solving online shopping’s $750 million fraud problem

• Mastercard’s chief product officer said consumers are increasingly turning to AI agents to make purchases online. The company released a product, Mastercard Agent Pay, last week to help facilitate this revolution in commerce, which may also help cut down on fraud.

AI is more than just creating funny images and getting prompt responses. It may also help you find the best deals. 

During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert said just like in search, consumers are moving from browsers to AI programs en masse for search and discovery of products, in what amounts to an impending “paradigm shift in commerce.”

Whereas previously consumers would search for something like “best running shoes” in a search engine like Google, they are now typing the same thing into ChatGPT and getting more expansive, tailored results. Instead of spending the effort to crawl the internet to find a product that fits, a consumer can now tell AI details about themselves that can help craft results and maybe even flag discounts, Lambert said.

“Once you’ve searched and discovered a product you want to buy, it’s only natural that you then ask the AI agent to buy it on your behalf,” he said.

To prepare for this shift in consumer behavior online, Mastercard last week announced Agent Pay to integrate payments into AI in a trusted way. 

“What we’ve announced last week is essentially the framework in which consumers, banks, agents, merchants, and the whole ecosystem could work together for a high trust system and a high consumer convenience system,” Lambert said. 

Incorporating AI into commerce also helps prevent fraud, which in 2024 hit $750 million in the category of online shopping, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Whereas previously the methods for preventing fraud were more general, Carlo Bruno, the vice president of product for payment platform Adyen, said by incorporating AI and allowing it more control of the process, fraud can be detected much more effectively, even if that means a slight drop in control.

“This is on the minds of merchants, how to find this delicate balance between knowing what’s going on versus truly embracing all this cool technology to solve this problem,” Bruno said.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay also aims to reduce fraud by tracking the entire process of a transaction using cryptography and “tokens.” 

“By doing that tokenization, even if a bad guy gets their hands on that credential, we can bind it back to its origin,” said Lambert.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com