Mastercard Forecasts 300 Million AI-Powered Shoppers by 2030 as Teen Adoption Races Ahead of Parents
Mastercard Forecasts 300 Million AI-Powered Shoppers by 2030 as Teen Adoption Races Ahead of Parents #
Mastercard is predicting significant changes to how consumers discover and buy products online. A new report from the company estimates that more than one in ten shoppers worldwide will routinely delegate purchases to AI agents by the end of the decade, a figure that translates to more than 300 million people globally.
The report, titled “A Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments,” draws on input from four futurists spanning the US, Europe and Asia alongside a survey of 26,000 parents and teenagers across 13 countries conducted with research firm Opinium in June and July this year. It projects that AI-driven consumer spending could reach £370 billion a year globally by 2030, with agent-assisted transactions across both consumer and business-to-business channels potentially running into the trillions of dollars.
The survey found a generational divide. Some 18% of teenagers already use an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini at least once a week to research and compare products before buying, roughly double the 9% rate recorded among their parents. Around a quarter of teens said they would be comfortable using a fully autonomous shopping assistant that selects and pays for products without further input, and a third said they would trust an AI’s product recommendation over a friend’s. Nearly one in four would place more trust in an AI’s judgment than that of their own parents.
Mastercard says trust will determine whether agentic commerce reaches scale. The company’s separate “Encoding Trust” signals report argues that agentic commerce will only reach scale when every action is provably bound by consent and visible to the user, not simply by handing over control. As AI agents increasingly act as intermediaries, brands may find themselves marketing to machines rather than people, making product information, claims and policies machine-readable a potential competitive advantage.
Futurist Magnus Lindkvist, one of the contributors, argued that commerce is splitting into two distinct activities. “By 2030, buying and shopping will no longer mean the same thing,” he said, predicting that agents will absorb routine transactional buying while human shoppers focus on discovery and pleasure. Mastercard said that earlier this year it and its partners completed Europe’s first live end-to-end agentic payment transaction.
Brice van de Walle, Executive Vice President of Core Payments Europe at Mastercard, described the move to agentic commerce as a continuation of the company’s decades-long mission, calling it “one of the most significant shifts in retail shopping in decades.” The report also forecasts that at least three G20 regulators will mandate formal AI agent registration and monitoring frameworks before 2030.
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