According to PYMNTS.com, Adyen is positioning itself as an early leader in the emerging field of agentic commerce, with Chief Commercial Officer Kamran Zaki highlighting the company’s existing strengths in authentication, fraud management, and multi-payment method support as transferable advantages. The company is collaborating with major players including Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol introduced October 14 and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) launched in September, with both companies citing Adyen as an early development partner. This strategic push comes alongside strong Q3 2025 results showing digital net revenue growing 10% year-over-year to €335 million, unified commerce jumping 32% to €194.8 million, and platforms surging 50% to €68.6 million. Adyen leadership emphasized that implementing agentic commerce protocols requires “not real significant work” given their existing infrastructure, allowing them to focus on creating optimal merchant and consumer experiences rather than technical integration challenges.
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What Agentic Commerce Actually Means for Payments
Agentic commerce represents the next evolution beyond simple automated payments, where AI agents actively make purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers. Unlike today’s one-click purchases, these AI agents will comparison shop, negotiate terms, handle returns, and manage subscriptions autonomously. The critical challenge isn’t just processing payments but ensuring these AI agents can operate securely across multiple merchants while maintaining authentication standards and fraud prevention. This shift fundamentally changes the role of payment processors from transaction facilitators to trust enablers for AI-driven commerce ecosystems.
Why Adyen’s Infrastructure Matters
Adyen’s confidence stems from their unified platform approach, which differs significantly from competitors who often maintain separate systems for online, in-store, and platform payments. Their single infrastructure means that implementing new protocols like those from Visa and Google doesn’t require rebuilding payment flows across multiple disconnected systems. More importantly, their existing fraud prevention and authentication capabilities—developed for human-initiated transactions—become even more critical when AI agents are making purchasing decisions at scale. The real test will be whether these systems can handle the volume and complexity of AI-driven purchases that may occur across multiple merchants simultaneously.
The Protocol Wars Begin
The simultaneous emergence of competing protocols from Visa and Google signals the beginning of a standards battle reminiscent of early payment network competition. Visa’s approach likely focuses on maintaining their network dominance by creating trusted pathways for AI commerce, while Google’s protocol probably emphasizes integration with their broader ecosystem including search, assistant, and advertising platforms. For Adyen, supporting multiple protocols simultaneously creates technical complexity but also positions them as Switzerland-like intermediaries—able to facilitate AI commerce regardless of which protocol gains market dominance. The risk lies in fragmentation if too many competing standards emerge before clear winners establish themselves.
Beyond the Technical Integration
While Adyen downplays the technical integration work, the real challenges lie in liability frameworks, consumer protection, and regulatory compliance. When AI agents make purchasing errors or fraudulent transactions occur through compromised AI systems, determining responsibility becomes exponentially more complex. Additionally, AI-driven commerce could dramatically change payment patterns—imagine thousands of AI agents simultaneously responding to limited-time offers or dynamically adjusting purchase timing based on predicted price changes. Adyen’s existing systems, while robust, were designed for human-paced commerce and may require significant adaptation to handle the potential volatility of agent-driven markets.
Broader Industry Impact
The move toward agentic commerce represents both an opportunity and existential threat for payment processors. Companies like Adyen with modern, unified architectures and strong fraud prevention capabilities are well-positioned to lead, while legacy processors with fragmented systems may struggle to adapt. More fundamentally, agentic commerce could compress the entire payment value chain—if AI agents can directly negotiate terms and process payments, the role of traditional payment intermediaries could diminish. Adyen’s early positioning and protocol partnerships suggest they understand this threat and are moving to establish themselves as essential infrastructure rather than replaceable intermediaries in the coming AI commerce landscape.
