Mastercard brings agentic commerce vision to India

Mastercard took the stage at the recent India AI Impact Summit to demonstrate India’s first ‘fully authenticated agentic commerce transaction.”

The inaugural agentic payments were done on Mastercards issued by Axis Bank and RBL Bank, for tokenised agentic purchases using Cashfree Payments, Juspay, PayU and Razorpay payment aggregators on merchants including Swiggy, Instamart, Vi and Tira. They were completed in alignment with the Mastercard Agent Pay framework, which outline guidelines for tokenisation and security in agentic AI systems.

“Agentic commerce is not really one piece of technology, it is a culmination of multiple things coming together,” says Gautam Aggarwal, president of India & South Asia at Mastercard, in a report from the Times of India. Describing the full customer journey from login to search to purchase, Aggarwal says agentic commerce enables automation of the entire process.

This, of course, raises questions about security. Know Your Agent protocols are the next frontier in authentication. Aggarwal mentions tokenization and passkeys as elements of a model that retains Mastercard’s high security standards. The payments giant was among the first globally recognized companies to adopt FIDO passkeys.

In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Nitendra Rajput, senior vice president and head of Mastercard AI Garage, says the biggest risks with agentic networks “lie in how these systems optimize, scale,and come to be relied upon. One concern is misaligned optimization, where an agent may prioritize speed or efficiency in ways that unintentionally conflict with a customer’s best interests. Another risk is cascading errors, because automated workflows amplify mistakes into larger failures if oversight is weak.”

Rajput says it is “essential to build systems with strong explainability, continuous monitoring, independent audits, and meaningful human oversight” in order to maintain trust and security.

He also stresses the need for a localized approach. “Global intelligence alone isn’t enough. India is unique with high digital adoption, diverse devices, assisted commerce and evolving social patterns. Our models combine localised learning, tuned continuously by our teams. This hybrid approach ensures we stay structurally ahead, not just reactive.”

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  authentication  |  KYA  |  Mastercard