Mastercard spent decades training its fraud system to see bots as thieves. Now bots are the ones doing the buying.

Every time a Mastercard gets tapped, the network has less than a tenth of a second to judge how likely the purchase is to be fraudulent. It made that call across 175 billion transactions last year. Now the buyer on the other side of that judgment is starting to change, and Greg Ulrich, the company's chief AI and data officer, spelled out the consequence for the VB Transform 2026 audience in Menlo Park on July 14. "We've built a bunch of risk rules over time that were intended to stop a bot from transacting," Ulrich said. "Now we need to enable the bot to transact, so that requires a change to our risk framework and our risk rules."Ulrich joined Mastercard eleven years ago when an analytics company he worked at was acquired, and said trust struck him from day one on the job. "It's what ena…