Helping the UK get AI-ready

By Simon Forbes, Division President, Mastercard  

Agentic AI is fast becoming one of the UK’s biggest commercial opportunities — changing how people shop, how businesses operate and how growth is created. Estimates suggest it could make a significant contribution to the UK economy too, with PwC putting the potential uplift to local GDP at up to 10.3% by 2030. 

The opportunity is clear, but it will only be realised if AI moves from idea to implementation at scale. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves MP put it in her recent speech at London Tech Week’s AI Adoption Summit: “The winners of the AI age will be those countries that can get AI out of the lab and into businesses.”

So how do we move from ambition to realisation?

In the UK, the answer starts with two practical and urgent questions: how can we test and scale new forms of AI-enabled commerce safely, and how can we help smaller businesses use AI in ways that support everyday decisions?

Those questions sit at the heart of new offerings which Mastercard is testing in and bringing to the UK as a priority, spurred by the UK Government’s action to modernise payments regulation, upgrade infrastructure and support innovators.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said:

“AI is the defining technology of our generation, critical to our economic future. The role of government is not to step back from the opportunities and challenges AI presents, but to step up.

“This is a strong vote of confidence as we look to make Britain the fastest adopter of AI in the G7.  By creating the right conditions for innovation and adoption, we can attract investment, boost productivity and supercharge growth for the economy.”

Testing agentic commerce safely in the UK

Agentic commerce will dramatically change the way people discover, choose and buy products online. But before agents are trusted to act on behalf of consumers and businesses and be deployed at scale, retailers and their partners need the tools and environments where they can evaluate performance, identify failure points and refine controls.

This is one of the reasons why, earlier this year, Mastercard created Agent Suite which combines technical support with Mastercard's payments expertise, data-fueled insights, proprietary technology platforms, and 4,000 global advisors to help retailers and their partners integrate agentic AI into their operations and build, test and deploy fit-for-purpose agents. These trusted agents will drive business value, with Agentic Commerce acting as a key example of that change. 

And we've now chosen the UK to announce that we’ll be expanding Agent Suite with Proto, a sandbox environment to explore, test and validate agentic AI use cases before introducing them into production. Thanks to Proto, which will be live in the UK in August, retailers and their partners will be able to test whether their products are discoverable by agents, how to scale the payment experience in a way that customers can trust, whether their plan for handling disputes in this environment works at scale, and much more — taking agentic commerce one step closer to real-world use.

Talking to UK retailers and banks last week, we also announced we’ll be introducing three new AI agents designed to support key enterprise functions and make retail AI-ready. Our shopping agent will bring greater intelligence to moments of customer engagement; our onboarding agent will help reduce friction when banks onboard retailers; and our dispute agent will make interactions between retailers and customers more seamless, helping prevent disputes.

The UK – with its digitally-savvy consumers, vibrant retail sector, sophisticated payment expertise and world-leading fintech scene – is an important place to test how agentic commerce will work in practice and we look forward to helping turn the UK Government’s ambition on agentic commerce into real benefits for businesses and consumers.

Helping UK SMEs use AI in everyday decisions

The second question is just as important: how do we make AI useful for smaller businesses, not just large organisations with specialist teams and deeper resources? In the UK, where SMEs make up 99.9% of businesses and are central to jobs, growth and local communities, that question has real urgency.

That is the thinking behind Mastercard Virtual C-Suite, an extension of Agent Suite, which will offer a set of AI-enabled digital executives designed to help small businesses access support that can otherwise feel out of reach, from finance and technology to information and operations. The first module, Virtual CFO, is expected to be introduced in the UK in 2027 as an early market in Europe — and one of the first markets globally outside the US to launch it.

Virtual CFO will securely use a business’s own financial information, combined with proprietary insights from billions of anonymised transactions processed on Mastercard’s network each year, to continuously analyse business performance, provide tailored recommendations on working capital and payment strategy, predict likely outcomes and suggest longer-term actions that help optimise finances and growth.

Business owners and their teams will get access to user-friendly dashboards and conversational interfaces through participating financial institutions, accounting platforms or software providers. They will be able to ask the agent direct questions (e.g., “What’s driving this week’s cash swing?”), drill into trend drivers and request recommendations on next steps – giving them access to a wealth of information and advice like they’ve never had before.

The UK has the ingredients to help shape the next chapter of AI in commerce and business, but no single company, sector or technology can do it alone. It will take partnerships across industry - retailers, banks, fintechs, technology providers, small businesses and policymakers - to build the trust, standards and practical use cases that allow AI to move safely from possibility to progress.

If we get that right, AI will not just be something businesses adopt; it will be something the UK uses together to unlock growth, strengthen confidence and create new opportunities across the economy.