Crystal ball: assisted vs autonomous adoption

In this episode of Retailgentic, Scot and Ken map out how Mastercard saw agentic commerce coming early, and what they built in 2025 to prepare the ecosystem, especially around trust, identity, consent, and tokenization.

We dig into: 

• How Mastercard Foundry takes ideas from experiments → production-grade products → global scale
• “Know Your Agent”: registering legitimate agents (agentic equivalent of KYC/KYB) to reduce malicious bot risk
• “Order Intent”: adding richer context so that with consent, agents/merchants can fulfill the right order (not just process a payment)
• Why consumer consent is non-negotiable (passkeys/biometrics + tokenized credentials)
• Mastercard Insight Tokens: a secure and governed way for agents to access and apply permissioned insights from Mastercard, which will enable consumers to receive, with their consent, more personalized and useful experiences
• Agentic Toolkit and why Mastercard leaned into services to support customers move from strategy → execution fast
• Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework: helps merchants to
• transact with trusted agents with a minimal lift
• Standards: why Mastercard will support ACP + AP2 and expects interoperability (or convergence) over time

Agentic commerce won’t be won by whoever moves fastest, it’ll be won by whoever earns trust at scale.

Key timestamps

• 05:14 — Ken’s background: technologist, global banking work, startups, Accenture, Citi → Mastercard Foundry
• 07:44 — How Foundry works: experiment, build, then “graduate” products into core teams
• 10:32 — The pace-of-change thesis: why organizations must be built to adapt continuously
• 13:07 — How Mastercard saw agentic commerce early (signal-spotting in 2024)
• 14:23 — The 3 converging forces: AI reasoning, compute, and foundations (tokens/passkeys/consent)
• 19:01 — AgentPay launch + what it includes (Know Your Agent, Order Intent)
• 21:05 — Consumer consent, passkeys/biometrics, and tokenizing payment credentials
• 22:25 — First agentic transaction (partner example)
• 23:19 — Agentic Toolkit + Insight Tokens + consulting expansion
• 26:00 — Merchant Acceptance Framework + scaling agentic readiness for the “long tail” of merchants
• 27:13 — Tokenization explained simply (cocktail-party version)
• 29:37 — Passkeys explained (biometric identity replacing passwords)
• 33:37 — Returns problem + how agentic workflows could reduce “buy 3, return 2”
• 40:19 — Standards wars: ACP vs AP2 + why Mastercard stays agnostic
• 44:03 — Crystal ball: adoption, trust, and why B2B may go autonomous faster
• 47:43 — The travel agent analogy: why some flows stay assisted by choice

👉 Connect with Ken: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-moore-cio/
👉 Learn more about Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.com/us/en.html

🔗 Agentic Toolkit: https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/press/2025/september/mastercard-unveils-new-tools-and-collaborations-to-power-smarter,-safer-agentic-commerce.html
🔗Agentic Commerce Rules, Mastercard Joins Google: https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/stories/2026/agentic-commerce-rules-of-the-road.html
🔗Agent Suite: https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/press/2026/january/mastercard-launches-agent-suite-to-ready-enterprises-for-a-new-e.html

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