The news: Citi and US Bank cardholders will get first access to Mastercard’s agentic payments technology, per Finextra.

How we got here: Mastercard announced Agent Pay, its agentic AI payment program, this April. 

Competitors soon followed with Visa, Affirm, and PayPal launching Intelligence Commerce, AdaptAI, and Agent Toolkit, respectively, as the industry recognized agentic AI as an inflection point for payments.

Early adopter advantage: Citi and US Bank can gain a competitive edge by offering their customers agentic payments. 

Cardholders will have to get comfortable with the new payment style, and issuers that give consumers the earliest start to build new payment behaviors will reap the rewards of this new infrastructure quickest.

AgentPay will have the ability to make purchases based on consumers’ provided feedback in a chat, e.g. consumer describes her ideal birthday party’s theme, venue, and anticipated weather conditions to an AI agent, which then buys items to her specifications and offers recommendations for the best way to pay. US Bank and Citi can get their cards recommended first by the agent, as the first issuers  onboarded.

Consumer disinterest: While c-suites already enthusiastically champion genAI use—87% of executives are comfortable with genAI to take over tasks and decisions for customers—regular US adults aren’t so keen.

Seventy percent of US adults are not interested in AI-powered shopping assistants, and only 24% are comfortable sharing data with a genAI tool, per a September 2024 EMARKETER and CivicScience survey.

Our take: Consumers are skittish about the rise of genAI, but their hunger for hyperpersonalized offerings fueled by AI technology may slowly sway more people to the pro-genAI camp. 

A recent study of 1,000 college-educated US adults showed that 70% of participants believed the benefits of AI outweighed the risks, per a KPMG study. Citi and US Bank can increase adoption of the tech—and make sure their cards are the payment methods attached to the new shopping medium—by linking increased rewards for consumer use to kick off new payment behavior.

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