Mastercard thinks one in ten online shoppers will let an AI agent shop and pay for them by 2030, and it’s honest about how it got the number. The report it published on September 8, “A Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments,” puts the figure at more than 300 million people, a projection built with four futurists, and Mastercard presents it as one.
The number underneath it is the harder one. Mastercard and Opinium asked 26,000 parents and teenagers across 13 countries in June and July about a fully automated assistant that recommends products, picks among them and completes the purchase under rules the user sets. Among teenagers, 27 percent said they’d likely use it; among parents, 16 percent.
Mastercard’s advice to retailers is the part that outlasts the forecast: it tells them to make product information, claims and policies machine-readable, and to treat trust, identity, authorization and transparency as the infrastructure the whole thing runs on.