Mastercard: One in Ten Online Shoppers Will Routinely Use AI Agents by 2030

Mastercard has published a report that puts a concrete number on a trend that until now has mostly been discussed in speculative terms. According to the company, by 2030 more than one in ten online shoppers worldwide will routinely delegate their purchases to AI agents, translating into more than 300 million users of such tools.

The report is titled "A Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments" and was presented on September 7, 2026 in London, with public release following a day later. The company paired its quantitative survey results with commentary from four futurists: Magnus Lindkvist, Patrick Dixon, Katja Forbes and Theodora Lau.

What the Survey Found

The survey was conducted by Opinium in June and July 2026 among a sample of 13,000 parent-teen pairs aged 13-18, spread across 13 markets: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom. It is one of the first surveys of this scale to directly compare trust in AI between parents and their children.

The generational gap is stark. Eighteen percent of teens say they already use AI assistants weekly to compare prices and offers, while among parents that figure is nine to ten percent. An even bigger gap shows up in trust: 31 percent of teens trust AI product recommendations more than advice from friends, and 23 percent trust them more than guidance from their own parents.

The Limits of Agent Autonomy

The report's key question was how much decision-making freedom consumers are willing to hand over to a machine. Twenty-seven percent of teens said they would be willing to use a fully autonomous shopping assistant that independently selects a product and completes the transaction according to pre-set budget rules. Among parents, that figure stands at sixteen percent.

Mastercard emphasizes that the agentic model works best for routine, repeat purchases, such as everyday items or subscriptions, where price and availability matter most. More emotional purchasing decisions, tied to fashion, style or prestige, the report's authors argue, are likely to remain in human hands for longer.

The shift to agentic commerce is one of the most significant changes in retail in decades - Brice van de Walle, Executive Vice President Core Payments Europe, Mastercard

The Money at Stake

The report estimates that spending driven by AI agents could reach 370 billion pounds annually by 2030. Mastercard notes that this figure is more a statement of the company's ambition than a hard research finding, unlike the survey data on consumer attitudes. Regardless, the scale of the forecast shows how much significance payment networks are placing on the coming shift in shopping behavior.

For companies like Mastercard, the stakes are direct: if an algorithm rather than a human is choosing the product and initiating payment, the entire chain of transaction authorization, fraud detection and settlement needs to be redesigned around a new type of customer, one that doesn't click but calls an API.

Poland Among the Surveyed Markets

Poland was among the 13 countries covered by the survey, alongside the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands, which is itself a signal that global payment networks consider the Polish e-commerce market mature enough to include in analyses of the future of shopping. The report does not, however, publish separate percentage results for Poland alone, presenting the data aggregated across all 13 markets.

For Polish online retailers and payment companies, this means that preparations for handling purchases initiated by AI agents, such as standardized product descriptions or APIs for completing transactions, are no longer a purely theoretical exercise. If Mastercard's forecast holds, Polish merchants too will have to handle traffic generated not by browsers but by autonomous shopping programs.

The report fits into a broader wave of analyses on agentic commerce that other payments and e-commerce companies have also published in recent months, reflecting growing interest in how to prepare commercial infrastructure for customers that aren't human. Mastercard says it will repeat the survey periodically, tracking the pace at which parents and their children actually hand control of the shopping cart over to machines.