Mastercard’s Sherri Haymond on Letting AI Shop

AI can find the shoes, compare prices and locate a merchant with the right size. The harder part begins when the consumer tells it, “Go buy them for me.”

At that point, agents have authority to act, potentially moving across platforms and merchant sites and using a payment credential to complete the purchase. For Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of digital commercialization at Mastercard, the ability to delegate is central to where agentic commerce is headed.

Haymond told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster at an agentic roundtable event hosted by Mastercard and PYMNTS that consumers don’t have to wait for fully autonomous shopping agents to encounter it.

“Agentic purchases are happening now,” she told Webster.

Specifically, Haymond has used Amazon’s Buy for Me feature to purchase merchandise from outside merchants when Amazon doesn’t carry it, with purchases ranging from roughly $25 to several hundred dollars. The consumer initiates the purchase through Amazon, while the transaction is with the outside merchant.

Haymond also pointed to Google’s AI Mode, where consumers can search for merchandise and, in supported experiences, check out from the search experience using Google Pay.

Neither example requires consumers to adopt a new shopping destination, which complicates the familiar picture of agentic commerce as a transaction conducted entirely inside a chatbot.

An agent can instead handle one or several parts of the purchase wherever the consumer happens to be shopping. Haymond doesn’t consider agentic commerce another channel alongside web, mobile and physical commerce.

“I don’t think it’s a new channel,” according to Haymond. “It’s a new mechanism and a new technology and a bit of an accelerant.”

Haymond said agent-assisted transactions can take place on mobile devices, websites and apps, and she can envision them operating in physical environments.

“You have an agent. You’re asking an agent to do something for you that you don’t have to do,” Webster observed.

Commerce Has to Remember What the Consumer Authorized

A merchant still needs to get paid, an issuer needs enough information to evaluate the transaction.  And beyond the initial transaction, a consumer needs recourse when a purchase is disputed. With an agent involved, payment participants also need visibility into the authority the consumer gave it.

Haymond said that information needs to be available when something goes wrong, including when an issuer is handling a chargeback.

“If something goes wrong, we should be able to rectify the situation,” Haymond said. “You can’t do that if you can’t see what happened.”

Tokenization provides part of the security foundation, she said, but it doesn’t fill all the information gaps created when purchasing authority is delegated. Haymond said payment participants need to know what the consumer or business authorized the agent to do.

The technical work required to create these experiences is changing, too.

Haymond recalled working roughly a decade ago on technology that would allow someone reading an article to purchase a featured product without leaving the content. It took months to connect the systems needed to make the transaction possible.

“It took so long to actually wire everything up to be able to make that happen,” she said.

Haymond said merchants can now expose organized product data through technologies such as MCP or WebMCP so agents can find it, reducing some of the custom integration earlier commerce experiments required.

Merchant participation isn’t automatic. Haymond said some merchants are wary of supplying their product catalogs to additional platforms. That concern has contributed to work on more open models that allow agents to find merchant information without requiring every merchant to upload its product data to another platform.

Consumers may see little of that machinery.

Haymond said shoppers using Amazon’s Buy for Me may have no idea that agentic technology is going to another merchant’s website, reading its information, checking inventory and facilitating a transaction on their behalf.

“I don’t think people even know,” she said. Consumers don’t necessarily have to understand the technology or configure agents themselves. They need interfaces that make assigning a task straightforward and enough confidence in the transaction to give software permission to carry it out.

Haymond expects those interfaces to become easier to use, moving agentic capabilities beyond technically sophisticated users who already give agents access to payment credentials while assigning them tasks.

What consumers delegate could expand along with that familiarity. Search and product comparison require little financial authority. Completing a purchase requires more. An agent able to operate across different shopping environments brings the two together, making the consumer’s original instruction consequential from discovery through payment.

Watch the full interview with Sherri Haymond to learn more about:

• How Haymond’s college-age son already gives agents access to payment credentials while assigning them other tasks.
• Why earlier efforts to embed purchases inside content required months of technical integration.
• Where Haymond can envision agents operating as agent-assisted commerce moves beyond today’s online examples.