Ask someone how far along agentic commerce is and you\u2019ll usually get an adjective. \u201cEarly.\u201d \u201cNascent.\u201d \u201cEmerging.\u201d Karen Webster wanted a number.<\/p>\n
So she gave Karan Katyal<\/a>, global head of agentic commerce at Adyen<\/a>, a scale. Zero means we\u2019re nowhere. Five means agentic is just an embedded part of how commerce happens, as ordinary as tapping a card. Where are we right now?<\/p>\n \u201cWe are at version 0.5,\u201d Katyal said. \u201cWe are in the earliest of early days. Still.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s the reality check. Now here\u2019s the part that should make every merchant sit up.<\/p>\n Webster pushed him out a year. Where are we next June? Katyal\u2019s answer was 1.5.<\/p>\n From 0.5 to 1.5 is a single point on the scale, which sounds like a rounding error. But it\u2019s also a tripling. We will do, in twelve months, three times everything that\u2019s been built to date. And after tripling, we\u2019ll still be 70% short of the halfway mark. Both things are true at once. The slope is steep and the summit is far. That\u2019s the whole shape of this moment in one sentence.<\/p>\n The AI Was Never the Hard Part<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Katyal\u2019s 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\u2019s everything after discovery that falls apart.<\/p>\n \u201cInfrastructure is a much bigger block than folks thought about, perhaps,\u201d Katyal said. And he\u2019s being polite. A traditional product listing needs maybe a dozen attributes to show up nicely on a webpage. An AI agent that\u2019s 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\u2019t carry that. Making them legible to machines isn\u2019t a tweak. It\u2019s a project.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s trust, which Katyal kept returning to.<\/p>\n \u201cTrust and risk and fraud all need to be at the center of the foundation of whatever you end up building,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This Isn\u2019t One Thing, and That\u2019s Why It\u2019s Slow<\/p>\n Part of why we\u2019re stuck at 0.5 is that \u201cagentic commerce\u201d isn\u2019t a single product anyone can ship. Katyal described several different models growing up at the same time, each with its own technical demands.<\/p>\n In some, the human stays in the loop the whole way through. In others, the agent buys autonomously once you\u2019ve set the rules. Then there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cFragmentation will continue for quite some time,\u201d Katyal said. \u201cAgentic commerce is really almost like a direction of travel.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Which is why he\u2019s blunt about the money. \u201cAgent commerce is almost like a series of experiments,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the thing that you need to justify this is hard numbers, now is not the time for it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n But Don\u2019t Read \u20180.5\u2019 as \u2018Come Back Later\u2019<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where Webster pushed back, and where merchants should pay attention. Low maturity is not permission to wait.<\/p>\n She\u2019s 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\u2019t have to lose. Waiting for certainty has almost never been the winning move. The consumers are already, in her words, \u201cknocking at the door.\u201d<\/p>\n The catch is that they can\u2019t get through it. \u201cConsumers just can\u2019t close the loop,\u201d 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\u2019ll be ready when the loop finally closes.<\/p>\n So what gets fixed first?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Both agreed there won\u2019t be one universal way to shop. It\u2019ll bend to the person and the moment. Sometimes you\u2019ll want the agent to handle it. Sometimes you\u2019ll want to drive. The infrastructure has to support both.<\/p>\n Adyen\u2019s Bet: Build the Connectors, Not Another Platform<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In a world stuck at 0.5, where nobody knows which protocol wins, Katyal says the smart play isn\u2019t betting on one. It\u2019s being able to plug into all of them.<\/p>\n