The time for painstakingly browsing through dozens of tabs in the browser is slowly coming to an end. A new type of customer is coming into play: one who, instead of typing phrases into a search engine, asks an AI assistant to find the best running shoes within a certain budget. The latest ‘Adyen Index: Retail Report 2025′ shows that Poland is becoming one of the leaders in this transformation, although domestic business does not yet seem to fully recognise the scale of the coming change.
The figures speak for themselves. Already 37% of Polish consumers are actively using ChatGPT and other AI tools to improve their shopping experience, and nearly half say they are ready to implement such solutions in the near future. This signals that the shopping process is shifting to so-called discovery channels – conversational platforms where an algorithm makes an initial selection, compares offers and verifies data before the user even reaches the website of a specific shop.
For brands, this is a double-edged situation. On the one hand, AI is becoming a powerful tool for democratising commerce – more than half of those surveyed admit that, thanks to AI, they are discovering smaller, niche brands that were previously lost in the information noise. On the other hand, there is a risk of ‘flattening’ the customer relationship. As Matouš Michněvič of Adyen points out, when the decision-making process is taken over by a neutral interface, the traditional building of an emotional bond with a brand becomes much more difficult. The key question for marketing directors today is: who will really own the customer relationship in a world dominated by autonomous agents?
Despite consumer enthusiasm, Polish companies are showing some reticence. While almost 9 in 10 Poles are open to AI-supported shopping, only 28% of companies planned to invest in this area last year. This technology gap could become a bottleneck, especially as the development of agentic commerce requires not only new algorithms, but above all a seamless payment infrastructure and the highest security standards.
