Would You Let AI Buy Your Flights? Mastercard’s Bet on Agentic Commerce | Next to Lead

Yeah, quite cyclical in nature.

Let's talk AI trust in cybersecurity.

Certainly what I'm seeing is that for years, tech leaders have worried about protecting data.

Today, it seems as though you all are increasingly worried about proven identity.

Is identity becoming the new challenge of the AI era?

So identity has always been a big challenge for anything online.

You know, what's the digital equivalent of showing up in a government office with your ID? And how do we do that? There's an old line about payments that payments are authentication.

After that, it's just accounting.

So knowing that you are you and how you can prove that identity.

So we've pushed that a long time.

Working with things like we've introduced pass keys, for example, to make online commerce more secure so you can identify yourself into the system.

We have a whole set of identity services where we can federate identity across different providers to give people a better signal.

that these are valid transactions and who they are.

So I think the ability for people to clearly identify who they are, for us to use that as a route of establishing trust, and then for that to cascade into subsequent actions becomes really, really important.

One of the things I like in what we're seeing with much more with AI, where we can use things like biometric signals and other passive identifiers for it, now in digital that we can use the device itself as a factor of identification, we can get a lot of that out of your way.

So it used to be the more secure you wanted to be, the more inconvenient you had to make it.

We now have this ability to do sort of a state change where it can be both profoundly more secure and convenient as we can combine this AI-based signals intelligence with device information and other things we could see in the system.

So we can kind of get out of the way, but make it a lot more secure for you.

But the root of trust is identity.

But it requires that your clients, your consumers, trust you with their biometrics data.

How receptive are you to that, to giving that data?

Well, I think if you look at how things like Passkeys work, we're using the biometric information, but it's your data, it's on your device.

So it's not giving up your biometric data, it's getting a signal that you are still you.

You are the person that when we did the initial tests and checks were bound or validated against the system.

and then that can be inherited from or delivered from the device.