Payments firm Adyen is reshaping its product roadmap and making strategic acquisitions after concluding that AI-powered shopping assistants pose an existential challenge to retailers’ direct ties with customers. The Dutch processor said merchants risk losing not only a sale but the data and repeat business that come from shoppers visiting a retailer’s site or app.
Why merchants are alarmed
Traditionally, a consumer would browse a retailer’s site, sign in and complete a purchase — a sequence that generated customer data and reinforced loyalty. But increasingly, AI chatbots and agent-like assistants can handle discovery, select the seller and complete payment on a shopper’s behalf, effectively keeping the purchase while severing the merchant’s access to the surrounding customer signals.
That threat is what prompted an unnamed merchant cited by Adyen executives to warn that while it currently gets 70% of its volume through direct channels, it wants to preserve that share as shoppers start searching and transacting inside conversational agents instead of on retailer properties.
“Loyalty becomes way more important,”
The comment came from Adyen co-CEO Pieter van der Does as the company laid out its response.
What Adyen is doing
Adyen has made a marked shift in strategy: the company has launched a new platform tailored to enterprise merchants that includes features intended to support payments initiated by AI agents, and it has purchased two companies to bolster merchant tools for retention and billing.
- Adyen acquired loyalty software provider Talon.One, signaling a push to help merchants retain customers outside of the traditional browsing-to-purchase funnel.
- It also bought billing specialist Orb, aiming to equip merchants and software firms with subscription- and usage-based billing capabilities relevant to AI services.
- The company is accelerating infrastructure spending, pulling forward investments in compute and storage capacity that had been planned for next year, citing higher costs and supply constraints.
Adyen said these moves represent a material change for the company: the purchases of Talon.One and Orb are the first acquisitions in its roughly two-decade operating history.
| Action | Purpose |
|---|---|
| New enterprise platform | Support payments from AI agents and large merchants |
| Purchase of Talon.One | Provide loyalty tools to help merchants retain customers |
| Purchase of Orb | Enable billing for usage-based or subscription AI services |
| Accelerated infrastructure spending | Increase compute and storage capacity ahead of schedule |
Implications for retailers and payments
Adyen’s client roster includes high-end merchants such as Hermès and Hugo Boss. For those brands, maintaining a direct relationship with shoppers is tied closely to marketing, pricing control and long-term customer value. If AI intermediaries begin to own the discovery and transaction experience, retailers could be relegated to the role of product suppliers while losing the loyalty signals that fuel repeat purchases and personalized marketing.
Beyond merchants, the change affects the broader payments and software ecosystem. If AI assistants start initiating transactions on behalf of users, payments firms and billing platforms will need to handle new flows, including automated authorization from third-party agents and new monetization models for AI services that may bill per-use.
Costs and constraints
Adyen told clients it is bringing forward spending on computing and storage to meet anticipated demand and to avoid price and supply pressures next year. Those investments reflect both the computational intensity of supporting AI-enabled checkout experiences and the need to scale securely as third-party agents interact with merchant systems.
The company’s repositioning underscores a broader industry question: as AI changes how consumers search for and buy products, who will capture the customer relationship — and the valuable data that accompanies it? Adyen’s acquisitions and platform work represent a bet that enabling merchants with loyalty and billing tools will be part of the answer.
