TL;DR

Mastercard surveyed 26,000 people across 13 European countries, deliberately in parent-and-teenager pairs, and found the generational split you would expect but rarely see measured: 18% of teenagers use an AI assistant at least weekly to compare products before buying, against 9% of their parents. A third of those teenagers said they would hand over choosing and paying entirely.

The paired-sample design is the useful bit

Most consumer AI research surveys a population and reports an average. Running 13,000 teenagers alongside 13,000 parents, questioned in pairs, isolates age from household income, country and shopping category — which makes the doubling harder to explain away.

Fieldwork ran in June and July, conducted with Opinium across countries including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The UK-specific breakdown was not published with the launch material.

Handle the forecast separately

Mastercard also projects that AI-driven consumer spending reaches £370bn a year globally by 2030, with more than 300 million shoppers routinely using agents to buy and pay. That figure is a vendor projection from a company selling the rails such transactions would run on, produced with four futurologists commissioned for the report, and it should be read as a statement of ambition rather than a finding. The survey data and the forecast arrived in the same launch; they do not carry the same weight.

The launch itself, held in London, included a commissioned embroidery retelling a millennium of payments in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry — currently on loan at the British Museum. It is a good piece of marketing and it is not evidence.

Looking forward

The operational questions raised are more substantial than the number. Agnes Woolrich, a senior Mastercard UK executive, put the sharpest one plainly: when a customer books a flight, liability and refund rights are well established — so who carries them when an agent books it instead? The report expects at least three G20 regulators to require formal registration and monitoring of AI agents by 2030, without saying which.

That lands awkwardly against the other UK research published today, showing only one in ten British shoppers trusts an AI recommendation at all. Retailers are being told to make their catalogues machine-readable for agents that most of their customers do not yet want acting on their behalf. Both things can be true — but the sequencing matters, and the trust deficit is the nearer constraint.