Polish e-commerce firms fear losing customer control to AI agents

Polish online retailers are facing a new problem: increasingly, it's not the customer choosing the product, but an algorithm choosing it for them. A study by Adyen finds that while companies see AI shopping agents as a chance to boost sales, more than a third fear losing their direct relationship with customers to software.

Agentic commerce is a model in which shopping no longer starts on a store's website or in a search engine, but in a conversation with a chatbot or an autonomous agent that searches offers, compares prices and completes the transaction on the user's behalf. Adyen, the Dutch payments company that serves merchants worldwide, published data from its annual Adyen Index report, which this year measures the scale of the phenomenon in Poland in depth for the first time.

Customers are already there

The most striking figure in the study is the gap between consumer readiness and business preparedness. Nearly 9 in 10 Poles say they are open to AI-assisted shopping, and more than half of respondents admit to using such tools to discover new brands, find inspiration and compare offers. Meanwhile, only 28 percent of businesses had planned to invest in this area last year.

This means demand for agent-driven shopping is outpacing the supply of solutions on the retailer side. Companies that fail to adapt their stores to be legible to algorithms risk becoming invisible at the very moment the purchase decision is actually made.

The consumer reaches the retailer with a more precisely defined need and a higher readiness to buy, because the algorithm takes over part of the decision-making process - Matouš Michněvič, Country Manager CEE, Adyen

Companies want in, but are afraid

A study by rp.pl, based on the same Adyen data, shows that despite general openness to agentic commerce, businesses have clear concerns. 38 percent worry about losing direct contact with customers, which for many brands means losing control over how their product is presented and priced. At the same time, 27 percent of companies say deploying AI agents will be a strategic priority for them over the next 12 months.

Sebastian Kopiej, a brand strategy expert at the Commplace agency, notes that algorithms are becoming the new trade intermediary, forcing brands to adapt to what he calls decision infrastructure instead of traditional marketing aimed directly at people. It's a shift in focus from the relationship with the customer to the relationship with the system that mediates it.

Fraud grows alongside adoption

The growth of agentic commerce also brings new security risks. According to the Adyen study, 25 percent of Polish companies report a rise in sophisticated AI-related fraud attempts, and 23 percent of respondents openly admit that artificial intelligence heightens their concerns about payment fraud. In response, 29 percent of e-commerce companies say they already use AI to detect fraud, showing that the same type of technology is simultaneously a source of threat and a tool for defense.

Autonomous shopping agents need access to a user's payment data and purchase history, which opens up new attack vectors if the agent's authentication process isn't properly secured. It's a question the payments industry is still searching for a standard answer to.

What this means for the Polish market

For Polish online stores and brands, the takeaways from the study are concrete: product data structure, descriptions and prices must be legible not just to humans but to the AI agent that will be making choices on their behalf. Companies investing in this now gain an edge before agentic commerce becomes the standard rather than a curiosity.

At the same time, the global market suggests the most pessimistic scenario, in which AI platforms fully take over the customer relationship, may not play out. Growing evidence points to a model where product discovery happens in conversation with an assistant, but the transaction itself and customer data remain with the retailer. That distinction is key to who ultimately profits from the customer relationship.

Sources: AI agents flood turns e-commerce upside down (rp.pl), Adyen study: online stores will lose customers if they don't prepare for agentic commerce (cashless.pl), Agentic commerce in Poland: 90% of consumers want AI support (brandsit.pl)