More than 300 million online shoppers worldwide could routinely delegate purchases and payments to AI agents by 2030, according to a new Mastercard report. The paper examined how autonomous software may reshape retail over the next four years. That would represent more than one in ten online shoppers.
The figure is a forecast developed with four futurists rather than a measured adoption rate. Mastercard paired those projections with consumer research conducted by Opinium among 26,000 people (13,000 parents and their teenage children aged 13 to 18) across 13 European and nearby markets in June and July 2026.
The expected shift goes beyond AI recommending products. Agentic commerce allows software to search, compare options and potentially complete purchases within budgets, preferences and permissions established in advance by the user. Mastercard expects recurring and relatively low-risk purchases to be among the first activities consumers delegate. Retailers may consequently have to make prices, product specifications, reviews and other commercial information easier for machines to interpret.
The concept is already moving beyond demonstrations. Santander and Mastercard completed a live end-to-end European payment executed by an AI agent in March using Mastercard Agent Pay within a regulated banking environment. Mastercard has since conducted additional transactions with European banks and payment providers.
The larger obstacle is trust. Letting software recommend a purchase is fundamentally different from allowing it to spend money autonomously. Agentic payments therefore require mechanisms that can prove which agent is acting, what the consumer authorized, how much it may spend and who is liable when something goes wrong.
Mastercard’s prediction should therefore be read as a scenario for 2030, not evidence that one in ten shoppers already plans to surrender checkout control to AI.