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Heightened fears of a recession and cutbacks on spending have not actually trickled down to the consumer, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said Wednesday.
“The consumer today is an empowered consumer that will still stick to what they want to do. They still want to make that trip,” Miebach told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson at the World Economy Summit in Washington, DC.
Consumer sentiment has slipped to its second-lowest level since 1952 after President Donald Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement that targeted countries far and near, from China to Canada, at the time.
Yet these consumer-sentiment surveys were mostly “soft data,” Miebach said. Hard data, like the huge quantity of real-time spending data his company gathers, still looks strong. Living through the height of inflation and the pandemic has let people grow accustomed to adjusting to an adverse environment, Miebach added.
Retail sales increased 1.4% in March from the previous month, according to the Commerce Department, which Miebach described as “nothing out of the ordinary.”
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Miebach also said that generative AI will play a bigger role in Mastercard’s services. He predicted that “a world of agentic commerce” will allow people to book their entire vacation more seamlessly in one place, without manually going through five to six separate services. A smart agent could put together all the information a traveler needs to book the trip — miles, airlines, to the latest information on the destination — and help them book it in less than two minutes, he said.
The application of generative AI, which he referred to as the ability to process “one trillion data points in real time,” in turn can help Mastercard save billions of dollars in fraud management. Since 2018, Miebach said the company has invested $11 billion in cybersecurity, and has established a goal of saving up $120 billion in fraud by 2030.
The Semafor View
CEOS need to be fluent in emerging technologies, but artificial intelligence will become as ubiquitous as did mobile and digital. But as AI becomes embedded in organizations, CEOs will need a more nimble approach to project management.