AI agents are now buying coffee and concert tickets in Europe
Banks in the Netherlands and Finland have completed the first autonomous AI agent purchases in Europe, marking a shift toward machines handling real transactions on behalf of customers.
On June 2, ING collaborated with Worldline and Mastercard to enable an AI agent to purchase concert tickets to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Days later, a Finnish bank Nordea processed the first agentic transaction in the country when an AI agent bought a coffee taster set.
In both cases, a human customer set parameters-preferred experience, date, and budget. The AI agent then found options, presented recommendations, and executed the purchase after customer approval. The transactions used Mastercard's Agent Pay protocol, which assigns encrypted tokens to each transaction instead of exposing card details.
How Agent Pay works
Mastercard introduced Agent Pay in 2025 to address a legal gap: AI agents cannot legally purchase goods because they are not recognized as people. The protocol grants AI agents authority to initiate and complete transactions using encrypted tokens specific to each purchase.
The technology relies on the same tokenization stack that powers contactless payments and card-on-file transactions. Each agent receives a unique encrypted token rather than accessing the customer's actual card number. This approach protects sensitive data while allowing the customer to maintain control over spending limits and transaction approval.
Mastercard also provides an Agent Toolkit to help AI assistants access and interpret the company's API documentation.
"AI has the potential to simplify how people manage everyday tasks, but trust and security must come first," said Erik Gutwasser, division president for Northern Europe at Mastercard. "Agent Pay is designed to ensure AI-initiated transactions are transparent, authenticated and always under the consumer's control."
Agentic commerce is expanding globally
Europe's transactions follow earlier milestones in the United States and Middle East. Mastercard said in October 2025 that U.S. Bank and Citibank cardholders could use Agent Pay, with other U.S. issuers gaining access by November. The UAE saw its first agentic transaction in late 2025 when an AI agent purchased cinema tickets through a collaboration between Mastercard, Majid Al Futtaim, and fintech Dataiera.
Early 2026 brought a series of transactions across Asia. An AI agent in South Korea paid for car service from Incheon International Airport to Seoul. Similar purchases occurred in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand using both Mastercard's Agent Pay and Visa's Intelligent Commerce protocol.
Visa and American Express have developed competing infrastructure. Visa's Intelligent Commerce includes AI-Ready Cards, which replace card details with tokenized credentials that authorize a specific agent to transact for a set period.
Why customers are using AI agents to shop
Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude now allow customers to instruct AI assistants to research and recommend products based on specific criteria. The AI can shortlist options, present them to the customer, and complete the purchase once approved.
Traffic from LLMs to e-commerce sites has grown sharply as consumers treat these assistants as personal shopping agents. As AI takes on more autonomous decision-making, it shifts from making recommendations to becoming a machine customer that executes transactions independently.
Brands are adapting by making their digital properties machine-readable so AI agents can surface their products in AI search results and purchasing workflows.
For customer support teams, this shift means handling inquiries about agent-initiated transactions, managing authorization settings, and explaining how to set spending limits and preferences for AI purchases. Banks like Nordea emphasize that transparency, customer authorization, and strong safeguards remain essential as transactions become more autonomous.
Learn more about AI agents and automation and how they're changing business operations.
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