Source: Beet
Mastercard's research surfaces a critical inflection point in how consumers are willing to cede spending authority to AI—one-third would allow autonomous agents to make purchases above $1,000 without approval, a threshold far higher than most current commerce implementations permit. This willingness to delegate financial decisions reveals consumer fatigue with friction more than AI readiness, and it exposes a massive liability gap: companies racing to deploy agentic commerce are building trust assumptions faster than regulatory guardrails or fraud protection can scale. The tension is whether the first major breach of autonomous spending authority will reset consumer expectations overnight.