Mastercard & KTC test Thailand's first AI ride booking

Mastercard and Krungthai Card have completed what they describe as Thailand's first live agentic transaction. In the pilot, an AI agent booked a ride through Elife.

The test took place in a controlled environment using Mastercard Agent Pay. An AI agent arranged transportation from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Central Chidlom via Elife, a mobility provider connected to the agent.

The payment used tokenised credentials and was authenticated with Mastercard Payment Passkeys. The setup was intended to keep the consumer in control while adding customer verification and data protection.

Travel focus

The ride-booking test points to a practical early use for AI-led commerce in Thailand, where travel remains a major area of consumer spending. By focusing on a single transport purchase, the pilot provided a limited real-world example of how an AI agent can select, book and pay for a service on a customer's behalf.

The transaction is part of Mastercard's broader regional push into what it calls agentic commerce, in which software agents initiate purchases once a user has granted permission. Similar authenticated agentic transactions have already taken place in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

That places Thailand among a growing number of Asia-Pacific markets where payment groups are testing whether AI tools can move beyond search and recommendation into the transaction itself. The commercial question for banks, merchants and payment networks is whether consumers will trust an automated agent to complete purchases while retaining enough visibility and control over what is being bought and how it is authorised.

Winnie Wong, Country Manager for Thailand and Myanmar at Mastercard, linked the pilot to the country's travel market. "Thailand continues to be one of the region's most attractive travel destinations, and its dynamic travel environment provides an ideal, real-world testbed for agentic commerce," Wong said.

"Through this collaboration with Krungthai Card (KTC), Mastercard's first partner in Thailand to test agentic AI transactions, consumer-authorized AI agents can help make travel experiences more seamless, while embedding trust, authentication, and security directly into payments," she added.

Local partner

Krungthai Card, widely known as KTC, is one of Thailand's largest credit card and consumer finance groups. It reports nearly 3.7 million accounts and more than 302 billion baht in annual credit card spending volume, giving it a large domestic base from which to test new payment methods.

Pittaya Vorapanyasakul, President and Chief Executive Officer of Krungthai Card, said: "AI-driven innovation in payments marks a significant step forward for the financial industry. Our collaboration with Mastercard reflects our strategic commitment to integrating agentic commerce into KTC's ecosystem - enabling smarter, more secure, and intuitive experiences for consumers. This milestone reinforces our role in advancing payment innovation in Thailand."

Elife's role reflects a broader effort by travel and transport providers to connect booking systems with financial services platforms. In this case, it supplied the ride-booking service used in the pilot transaction.

"This collaboration with Mastercard on AI agent-powered payments marks Elife's first strategic step into the fintech ecosystem. As AI continues to reshape the travel landscape, Elife is focused on strengthening connectivity through its core mobility services-ride-hailing and pre-booked airport transfers-enabling travelers to move seamlessly from arrival to destination. Through this partnership, we aim to integrate Elife's global ground transportation services into intelligent financial ecosystems, allowing consumers to discover, book, and pay for rides effortlessly within the platforms they already trust," Sayan Datta, VP of Sales at Elife, said.

Regional build-out

Beyond the Thailand pilot, Mastercard is investing more in AI-led transaction infrastructure across Asia-Pacific. This includes a regional AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore, closer work with large language model providers and AI agent developers, and specialist teams supporting financial institutions and merchants.

Those plans suggest card networks see agent-led payments as a new layer in digital commerce rather than a standalone product. The challenge will be fitting these transactions into existing payment, fraud and authentication frameworks while making clear when a human user has delegated authority to a machine.

For now, the Thailand trial remains narrow in scope, centred on a single authenticated ride booking. But it marks another attempt by the payments industry to turn AI from a front-end assistant into a participant in the checkout process, using tokenised credentials, passkey-based authentication and explicit consumer consent.