Mastercard’s commerce media boss on what happens when AI agents do the buying

That question sits at the center of Mastercard’s thinking right now and is why a conversation with Nili Klenoff feels less like a victory lap and more like a strategy session.

Klenoff leads Mastercard’s newly launched commerce media business, formally unveiled last autumn. It is already operating at a scale most “emerging” media channels can only gesture at. But the more interesting story is not how fast commerce media is growing, but how it might need to change to survive agentic AI.

A disruptive medium meets its own disruption

Mastercard’s commerce media proposition didn’t originate as a media idea. It emerged from infrastructure.

“We’ve been running personalized card-linked offers for over a decade,” Klenoff says. “What we’ve done now is evolve that into a broader value proposition, inclusive of more kinds of content, reaching more consumers and solving more problems for advertisers around the world.”

That evolution has produced a network of around 500 million consented consumers and more than 25,000 brands, connected through direct, one-to-one publisher integrations. Consumers are enrolled in logged-in environments. Content, incentives and offers are personalized at an individual level. Crucially, campaigns can be measured against actual transactions.

“We have the ultimate proof of purchase,” Klenoff says. “That becomes a very powerful value-add to brands.”

It’s exactly this closed-loop logic that has made commerce media so disruptive to traditional digital advertising. It promised certainty in a world of signal loss and it arrived just as CMOs were under renewed pressure to prove ROI.

However, the same foundations that made commerce media disruptive are now being challenged by something even more radical: AI agents that not only recommend but also decide.

When discovery collapses into decision

“This time last year, it was AI,” Klenoff says. “Now it’s agentic. You can’t get away from it.”

What concerns – and interests – her is how quickly behavior is shifting. “We released a holiday stat that showed over 50% of younger consumers are now going to generative AI for recommendations and they’re trusting those recommendations more than they trust their own.”

That single line quietly detonates much of the logic underpinning brand and performance marketing alike. If discovery increasingly happens inside agentic interfaces, then persuasion looks very different. If agents move from recommendation to action, the “moment of influence” compresses dramatically.

“The shopping journey has fundamentally changed,” Klenoff says.

For commerce media, that’s existential. The category was built on the idea of influencing consumers close to the point of purchase. Agentic AI threatens to remove the consumer from that moment altogether.

Mastercard’s response: infrastructure over interruption

Rather than resisting this shift, Mastercard is trying to make itself indispensable to it.

“If those agents are ultimately going to do autonomous buying, consumers have to trust them,” Klenoff says. “That means standards, governance and layers of security.”

Mastercard is already working on what it describes as agentic pay – systems that allow AI agents to transact securely on a consumer’s behalf.

“That means securing the identity of the agent itself, securing the transaction and making sure all the protections that exist today are still present in an agentic ecosystem.”

This is where Mastercard’s role becomes less “media owner” and more market infrastructure. Trust, not attention, becomes the scarce asset. And commerce media, in this context, becomes less about placement and more about participation in automated decision-making.

From Klenoff’s perspective, agentic environments are simply another surface – albeit a consequential one.

“We think about agentic as another publishing environment,” she says. “As long as the intent signals can be fed in and the identification for the consumer is there, we can still run our solution and provide value.”

That line matters. It suggests that commerce media doesn’t disappear in an agentic world – but it does mutate. Personalization no longer targets people directly; it informs the systems acting on their behalf.

The uncomfortable implications for brands

If that sounds abstract, the implications are anything but – especially for brand marketing. “The agent is the audience,” Klenoff says. “Not just the consumer.”

In an agentic world, brands are no longer just competing for attention or emotional resonance. They are competing to be legible to machines. That means relevance, reliability, availability and value may outweigh storytelling at the moment of decision.

This doesn’t kill brand marketing – but it changes its job. Brands still need to create meaning, trust and preference. But they also need to structure their data, propositions and signals in ways agents can interpret and prioritize.

That’s a profound shift for an industry still arguing about the boundaries of retail media.

Measurement still anchors the system

For all the futurism, Klenoff is clear that some fundamentals haven’t changed. “Measurement is still really important. I’m not hearing anything that contradicts that.”

In fact, agentic systems may increase pressure for proof rather than reduce it. If buying decisions are automated, brands will want even greater confidence about what influenced them.

This is where Mastercard believes commerce media still holds an advantage. “We can close the loop. We can show what influenced the sale.”

That ability to demonstrate incrementality and not just exposure becomes more valuable as the decision-maker shifts from human to machine.

Adapting, not defending

There’s a temptation to frame commerce media as “growing up.” Klenoff resists that language. This is not maturation so much as adaptation under pressure.

Retail and commerce media disrupted digital advertising by tying media directly to transaction. Agentic AI now threatens to disrupt commerce media by collapsing the very moments it was designed to influence.

The question is not whether commerce media survives, but whether it can reposition itself inside an automated decision economy.

For Mastercard, the answer lies in infrastructure, trust and interoperability rather than formats or hype. For the rest of the industry, the message is more uncomfortable: the next phase of disruption won’t come from a new media channel, but from the disappearance of the consumer as an active participant in the buying process.

And that changes everything.

Commerce media is moving fast. The Drum Awards for Commerce Media are here to recognize the work keeping pace – and setting the standard. Join us in Miami in April as part of The Drum’s year-round Commerce Media program. Learn more and enter.