India AI Impact Summit 2026: Mastercard unveils India’s first fully authenticated agentic commerce transaction

Imagine asking an AI-powered chatbot to find the best deal on a new pair of belt, verify the website is safe and complete the purchase – all without you ever opening a shopping app or typing in your card details – That’s what Mastercard unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. Mastercard successfully demonstrated India’s first ‘fully authenticated agentic commerce transaction’. In plain English: an AI agent is given the power to shop and pay on behalf of a human, using a secure and regulated framework.For the average consumer, digital shopping usually involves a lot of manual work: opening an app, searching for a product, and eventually being redirected to a payment screen. Agentic Commerce automates this whole process. “Agentic commerce is not really one piece of technology, it is a culmination of multiple things coming together,” Gautam Aggarwal, president of India & South Asia at Mastercard, told The Times of India.“So the way I will probably explain it to a common man is today if you are doing any kind of a e-commerce digital commerce transaction: you go to an app, you probably have a credential where you've created a username password for yourself, you go through the journey of discovery of what you want to buy, you type in a search. And then you’ll end up going through a journey of payment. What agentic commerce has enabled available is bringing all of this in a way which is automated,” he explained.Mastercard is is involved with a massive network of Indian banks and payment providers. Mastercard cards issued by Axis Bank and RBL Bank were used using the demo. Payment aggregators like Razorpay, Cashfree, Juspay, and PayU provided the plumbing and the AI successfully interacted with merchants including Swiggy, Zepto, Vi (Vodafone Idea), and Tira.When it comes to money, people are pretty much wary about the expenses and security. Giving an AI “permission to pay” sounds risky, but Mastercard emphasises that the transaction used the same robust security features Indians are already familiar with.“We have built in a lot of security in the way we allow for payments to happen. The first phase of that was, of course, through tokenization and then now with passkeys. In the automated requires, there is enough Safety and Security built into payment systems, both by regulation and by innovation that companies like ours have done,” Aggarwal added. When talking about the challenges regarding wide adoption in India, Aggarwal said that scalability is no problem and it isn't the technology – it's consumer education.. “The challenge always remains is generally what we see is the lack of education. We have to keep educating consumers,” he said.Mastercard plans to expand this framework across the Asia Pacific region, working with Large Language Model (LLM) providers to ensure that as Indians start talking to AI more, they can trust it with their wallets, too.