Mastercard expects 300 million people to shop through AI agents by 2030

Mastercard expects more than one in ten online shoppers to buy through AI agents by 2030. That is about 300 million people. The payments firm published the forecast on 8 September 2026 alongside a survey of 26,000 people in Europe and Israel.

Opinium polled 13,000 parent and teen pairs in June and July

The fieldwork ran in June and July 2026. Research firm Opinium spoke to 13,000 pairs, each made up of one parent and one teenager aged 13 to 18. The 13 markets were Bulgaria, Czechia, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

Mastercard did not publish country-level splits. It also did not say how it turned the survey into the 300 million figure. Both numbers come from the company, not from an outside body.

Teens outpace parents on every measure in the survey

Among teenagers, 27 per cent said they were likely to use a shopping assistant run entirely by AI. Among parents the figure was 16 per cent. Weekly use of AI to check prices and discounts reached 18 per cent of teens and 10 per cent of parents.

Trust moves the same way. Almost a third of teens, 31 per cent, said they would trust an AI product tip over a friend’s advice. Just under a quarter, 23 per cent, said the same about their parents’ advice. Younger parents sit in between: 14 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 use AI weekly to research products, against 10 per cent of those over 55.

Parents see the shift as their children’s, not their own. Two thirds, 67 per cent, said AI shopping will define their child’s generation. Only 5 per cent said it will define theirs.

Mastercard sells the rails these purchases would run on

Brice van de Walle, who runs core payments in Europe at Mastercard, said AI “increasingly helps people decide what to buy”. The company has a stake here, because agent purchases still need a card network to settle. Read that forecast with the seller in mind.

Retailers are already building for it. Instacart gives retailers a white-label AI shopping assistant, and product feeds now shape what ChatGPT recommends to shoppers. Neither yet completes the payment on its own.

The survey closed before the holiday season, which is when agent shopping meets real baskets. So here is the question for the next round of figures in early 2027: did any of these teenagers let an agent finish a purchase, or did they stop at the research step?