But instead of horses, ships and an arrow in King Harold’s eye as William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy, the new artwork that Mia Hansson made over three months, shows the story of payments over the last millennium, in the same style as its more famous near namesake.   

For example, in 650-490 BCE the first silver coins are embroidered into the new modern Payeux Tapestry artwork, while at the far end there is a panel that shows machine-to-machine (M2M) payments and robotic autonomous commerce, as awaiting us in the future.  

“As the Bayreux Tapestry artwork returns to the UK for the first time in almost a thousand years (it’s on display at the British Museum after a loan from its French home), we’ve recreated the story of payments in its inimitable style,” said Woolrich. Other fun embroidered panels in the modern reimagination show the invention and use of contactless cards, digital wallets, and an end-to-end agentic payment, as enacted by medieval looking peasants and nobles.     

Futurologists make their predictions

Also at the 7th September launch in London was Magnus Lindkvist (pictured below), one of four futurologists who contributed to the report providing their qualitative predictions for the future, alongside the quantitative ones made by the aforementioned survey.  

Speaking exclusively to RTIH, Lindkvist said: “Ultimately, agentic AI commerce is a time saver. It is akin to the washing machine in the huge amounts of time it can save people from doing everyday utilitarian tasks.”    

This frees them up for more creative tasks, although Lindkvist did caution that: “The vision of each major technological advancement is never its reality.”

In other words, agentic AI may yet unfold differently, but for now Lindkvist is predicting AI will “get things done” and increase automation on everyday chores in the commerce and transaction chain like subscriptions management. This will allow people to go on more ‘experiential’ physical shopping trips.   

“AI is also in a ‘balloon era’, which means it will get reflated even if there is a crash, because it is not in an unjustified bubble,” added Lindkvist.

He thinks the technology is too powerful and useful – on applications in the services layer or on dynamic pricing end uses for instance – to be impeded, even if the stock market does fly too high initially during AI’s early adoption phases. “It’s akin to the dot.com era in that regard.”    

The other futurologists involved in the Mastercard sponsored report were: Patrick Dixon; Katja Forbes; and Theodora Lau. Each contributed a chapter to the accompanying book, supported by various Mastercard senior professional’s advice to cardholders, retailers and financial institutions about what to do to be ready for this future.  

Dixon looked at shopping and predicted slow websites will lose up to 80% of sales. Enhanced AI enabled search will also turn its results into sales as the agentic element of the technology advances. Plus adoption will be led by the US, UK, China and South Korea, he believes, with new cyber attack risks making some laggard consumers wary.  

Forbes focused on retail impacts, such as AI agents networking together to negotiate at scale and therefore get better value for consumers. His future-gazing also foresees AI agents acting as verification tools in future and embedding themselves in wearables like glasses. Wearables will also drive a post-sales data feedback loop. 

Lau examined agentic AI’s impact on payments, principally via the end of ‘top of wallet’ thinking and the rise of know your agent rather than customer compliance practices.