Adyen on Agentic Commerce: The AI Was Never the Hard Part

Watch more: Monday Conversation with Adyen’s Karan Katyal

Ask someone how far along agentic commerce is and you’ll usually get an adjective. “Early.” “Nascent.” “Emerging.” Karen Webster wanted a number.

So she gave Karan Katyal, global head of agentic commerce at Adyen, a scale. Zero means we’re nowhere. Five means agentic is just an embedded part of how commerce happens, as ordinary as tapping a card. Where are we right now?

“We are at version 0.5,” Katyal said. “We are in the earliest of early days. Still.”

Not a one. A half. On the most-hyped shift in commerce since the smartphone, the person at Adyen running the agentic business put us at one-tenth of the way to the midpoint. That’s the reality check. Now here’s the part that should make every merchant sit up.

Webster pushed him out a year. Where are we next June? Katyal’s answer was 1.5.

From 0.5 to 1.5 is a single point on the scale, which sounds like a rounding error. But it’s also a tripling. We will do, in twelve months, three times everything that’s been built to date. And after tripling, we’ll still be 70% short of the halfway mark. Both things are true at once. The slope is steep and the summit is far. That’s the whole shape of this moment in one sentence.

The AI Was Never the Hard Part

Here’s Katyal’s take. The intelligence works. People already lean on large language models to research products, compare options and shorten a list of twenty down to three. Discovery feels effortless. It’s everything after discovery that falls apart.

“Infrastructure is a much bigger block than folks thought about, perhaps,” Katyal said. And he’s being polite. A traditional product listing needs maybe a dozen attributes to show up nicely on a webpage. An AI agent that’s trying to tell two similar products apart needs far more, like maybe three times more. Detailed specs, reviews, context, the stuff a human reads between the lines. Most catalogs simply don’t carry that. Making them legible to machines isn’t a tweak. It’s a project.

Then there’s trust, which Katyal kept returning to.

“Trust and risk and fraud all need to be at the center of the foundation of whatever you end up building,” he said. Not bolted on at the end. At the center. Because the moment an agent acts on your behalf, the questions get more precise. Who’s liable when the agent books the wrong flight? When it misreads what you asked for and buys it anyway? A botched checkout is annoying. A botched delegation is a dispute about responsibility.

This Isn’t One Thing, and That’s Why It’s Slow

Part of why we’re stuck at 0.5 is that “agentic commerce” isn’t a single product anyone can ship. Katyal described several different models growing up at the same time, each with its own technical demands.

In some, the human stays in the loop the whole way through. In others, the agent buys autonomously once you’ve set the rules. Then there’s machine-to-machine, where software transacts with software. And business procurement, which is its own animal entirely. Four directions, four sets of standards, and no referee.

“Fragmentation will continue for quite some time,” Katyal said. “Agentic commerce is really almost like a direction of travel.” Not a destination you arrive at. A heading you point toward while competing protocols, onboarding flows, checkout requirements and payment methods all sort themselves out underneath you.

Which is why he’s blunt about the money. “Agent commerce is almost like a series of experiments,” he said. “If the thing that you need to justify this is hard numbers, now is not the time for it yet.”

But Don’t Read ‘0.5’ as ‘Come Back Later’

Here’s where Webster pushed back, and where merchants should pay attention. Low maturity is not permission to wait.

She’s watched this movie before. Businesses that dragged their feet on the shift from stores to digital, and then again from digital to mobile, spent years clawing back ground they didn’t have to lose. Waiting for certainty has almost never been the winning move. The consumers are already, in her words, “knocking at the door.”

The catch is that they can’t get through it. “Consumers just can’t close the loop,” Webster said. The interest is real. The intent is real. The path from intent to purchase is broken. And the merchants who fix their half of that path now, during the experimentation window, are the ones who’ll be ready when the loop finally closes.

So what gets fixed first?

Katyal expects the low-drama purchases to lead: the repetitive household restocks, the low-consideration buys where handing off the task removes friction without making anyone nervous about losing control. Webster added a twist. AI may turn out to be just as valuable at the top of the consideration curve, on the big researched purchases, where the real payoff is the gathering and the comparing, not the click that ends it.

Both agreed there won’t be one universal way to shop. It’ll bend to the person and the moment. Sometimes you’ll want the agent to handle it. Sometimes you’ll want to drive. The infrastructure has to support both.

Adyen’s Bet: Build the Connectors, Not Another Platform

Against that backdrop, Adyen rolled out Adyen Agentic, which bundles product discovery, checkout orchestration and payments into modular pieces meant to cut the integration headache across the various AI commerce protocols.

The logic tracks with everything above. Help merchants make their product data machine-readable. Let them keep the checkout and fulfillment systems they already run. Extend the authentication, tokenization and fraud controls they trust into agentic environments, without forcing a rebuild for every new platform that shows up.

In a world stuck at 0.5, where nobody knows which protocol wins, Katyal says the smart play isn’t betting on one. It’s being able to plug into all of them.

Watch the full conversation to learn more about

Why the math on “0.5 to 1.5” should change how you think about timing.

Why AI shopping needs better product data before it needs better AI.

How to experiment with agentic commerce without marrying a single platform.

Why trust, not transaction volume, is the currency that matters right now.