Mastercard's Five Pillars for Trust in Agentic Commerce

As AI agents take on more shopping and payment tasks, trust moves to the center of the transaction. Mastercard's Greg Ulrich recently discussed what it takes to build a framework that lets autonomous software act on behalf of consumers without compromising security.

In an interview, Ulrich outlined five pillars intended to support agentic commerce. The details matter because AI-led transactions differ from familiar card-not-present flows: software, not a person, initiates the purchase. A trust framework must give all participants confidence that an agent is authorized, the transaction is genuine and the parties can be held accountable.

The discussion arrives as payments companies and merchants explore how AI assistants can handle everything from product research to checkout. For that vision to scale, trust cannot be an afterthought. It has to be designed into how agents are identified, how consent is managed and how disputes are resolved.

Ulrich's five-pillar approach offers a way to organize those concerns. While the industry is still early in adopting agentic commerce, the conversation signals that security and accountability will shape whether consumers and businesses embrace AI-led payments.