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Adyen joins the Agentic AI Foundation
Adyen joined the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — an industry initiative that brings together companies operating critical agentic technology to help shape how agentic systems develop and interact.
This week, Adyen joined the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — an industry initiative that brings together companies operating critical agentic technology to help shape how agentic systems develop and interact.
We don’t join industry initiatives lightly. Our decision to join isn’t about endorsing a particular vision of AI or predicting exactly how commerce will evolve. It’s about working in the open, alongside other companies that operate critical global infrastructure, to ensure that as AI agents begin to participate in commerce, the foundations they rely on are reliable, open, interoperable, and built around customer needs from day one.
We’re already seeing early signs of agent-initiated interactions entering the customer journey. In some cases, agents support discovery or comparison. In others, they go further and initiate a transaction. These flows are still emerging, and many open questions remain — not only technical, but operational, commercial, and regulatory as well. From our perspective, that uncertainty makes infrastructure choices more important, not less.
Why neutral, cross-industry collaboration matters now
The Agentic AI Foundation exists to create shared ground in a rapidly evolving space. By placing key agentic protocols under neutral governance and bringing together cloud providers, AI developers, and commerce and infrastructure platforms, it enables the ecosystem to test, learn, and iterate without locking businesses into early assumptions. This supports an early phase where multiple approaches can coexist, while creating the conditions for convergence around trusted standards over time.
Our participation reflects what we hear directly from our customers. They see the potential of agentic commerce, but want it to integrate into and supplement existing operations, not replace them. They want agents to act on clear shopper intent, and for consumers to be able to maintain their relationships with their brand. They want control over payment methods, routing, and data. And they expect the same levels of security, compliance, and reliability they apply to every other channel they operate today.
Those conversations have shaped our thinking. Earlier this year, we shared our merchant first framework outlining how we believe agent-led commerce should be built.
What this means in practice
We believe that agent-initiated transactions shouldn’t require a separate payments and risk stack. They should run on the same systems that already power payments and risk management at scale. In practice, that means extending the platforms our customers already trust, rather than introducing new, siloed flows.
This is where Adyen’s work on authentication, tokenization, fraud prevention, and global compliance becomes directly relevant. As automation increases, these capabilities don’t fade into the background, they become the mechanisms that make trust possible. They enable businesses to participate with confidence across markets with very different regulatory expectations.
We don’t expect a single dominant model to emerge overnight. Different industries will adopt agentic commerce at different speeds, and some journeys will remain human-led well into the future. What matters is that the ecosystem remains flexible enough to support this diversity, while still enabling interoperability as new models take shape.
That’s why we joined the Agentic AI Foundation. It’s a practical way for us to support open standards and shared protocols, and to help shape how agentic commerce develops in a way that preserves choice for businesses. Working alongside other companies that operate critical global infrastructure, we see this as a place to learn, test, and converge, where agent-led commerce can evolve incrementally, grounded in real business needs and built to scale over time.
Tom Adams