Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
I may have been wearing a surgical mask the first time I shook hands with Michael Miebach. In June 2021, Mastercard invited me to its headquarters to interview Miebach, who’d become chief executive officer in January. At that point, much of the business world, including Mastercard, had started returning to their offices post-pandemic, but indoor masking and social distancing were still commonplace. (In this video we look like we’re about six feet apart from each other.)
Miebach navigated Mastercard through the end of the pandemic. Since then, he has diversified beyond consumer credit cards into businesses such as data, insights, digital identities, and stablecoins, growing revenue from $18.9 billion in 2021 to $32.8 billion in 2025—and analysts expect 2026 revenue to top $37 billion.
I recently caught up with Miebach (no mask this time) and asked him what he’s better at today than five years ago when we first met. He says he’s embraced the power of collaboration. Before becoming president of Mastercard, he was chief product officer, where he was “just doing stuff for us.” As CEO, he has come to appreciate the importance of the payments ecosystem working. “It comes down to changing [my] mindset from ‘I want to compete and differentiate only’ to ‘I want to compete and collaborate.’”
AI opportunities—and limitations
Miebach says cross-industry cooperation is alive and well in Mastercard’s efforts to support agentic commerce, in which artificial intelligence agents find the optimal product on behalf of humans. The agents proved great at research, and even negotiating deals, but completing transactions has been more elusive. Miebach says Mastercard’s approach has been to treat agents as an additional partner in the payments ecosystem, which traditionally has consisted of the cardholder, the bank that issues the card, the merchant, and the acquiring bank, which allows the merchant to accept payments. Card networks such as Mastercard and Visa link the parties together.
In early 2025, the company launched Mastercard Agent Pay in the U.S. to integrate AI agents into the checkout process. In June, the company launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), which aims to let agents transact with other agents continuously and at very high speeds. In announcing AP4M, Mastercard highlighted 31 participants, many of them fintech companies, underscoring the role of partnership.
To be sure, there are also other coalitions and cooperatives being formed in the agentic commerce space, and different standards are emerging, too. There are competing payments protocols for payment authorization, for example.
Leading through change
Miebach believes the broader payments ecosystem will eventually coalesce around a set of standards, much the way companies came together around the Apple Pay digital wallet.
And while it took Apple Pay, introduced in 2014, more than half a decade to become nearly ubiquitous, today 80% of Mastercard’s in-person transactions globally are contactless. Miebach is optimistic that agentic purchases, a “tiny” amount of the 180 billion transactions Mastercard processes annually, are poised to accelerate once industry players are aligned on regulations, tech standards, loyalty points integrations, and, crucially, systems that engender trust among consumers. Such systems include “know your agent” software that verifies that an AI agent is acting on behalf of a customer, as well as fraud monitoring and the ability to challenge unauthorized purchases.
Indeed, for Miebach, agentic commerce isn’t just theoretical. He mentions during our meeting that he used an agent to make a purchase that day. The purchase—printer paper—wasn’t exciting or expensive, but, importantly, he says, “It worked.”
Another thing that has changed for Miebach since taking the top job at Mastercard more than five years ago: He says he’s more comfortable with change and uncertainty. COVID was a lesson in leading without a playbook, and the fast pace of change means executives don’t always have all the answers. In fact, employees and leaders alike are often learning as they go, especially when working in fast-moving technologies such as agentic commerce. It’s another mindset shift Miebach has adopted. Today, he says, “I can [operate] much better with not having an answer.”
Modern CEO of the year
Modern CEO is seeking nominations for the 2026 Modern CEO of the Year. If you or a CEO you know has had an exceptional year driving innovation, transforming a business, or future-proofing a company, please share their story via this form. The deadline for submissions is December 4, and the CEO or CEOs of the year will be unveiled on December 28.
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