We have lift off

We're all drowning in AI news.

AI feature this, generative AI feature that... the SaaS industry is littered with products implementing AI features that do little more than... show they're implementing AI features.

Thankfully, Adyen is not one of those products.

Adyen kicked 2025 off with a bang by launching Adyen Uplift, an AI-powered payment optimisation product.

AI-powered what now?

Sounds a bit niche, for sure, but stay with us, this is cool.

Adyen is a payment processing platform, like Stripe but, so far, smaller. In 2024, they processed over 300 billion euros in transactions — so not that small.

Customers of payment processing products like Adyen frequently face a problem: failed transactions.

Transactions typically fail due to fraud prevention measures which, it turns out, are often false positives. Identifying fraud has historically been done through a series of siloed verification processes on the end user, aka slow and boring and prone to failure.

This isn't just annoying to their customers. It also costs Adyen a pretty penny as they miss out on juicy fees, all because they're putting the kibosh on perfectly safe transactions.

But that was before.

Their new product, Adyen Uplift, uses AI trained on over $1 trillion in transactions to recognise shoppers, identify (good or bad) payment behaviours, and convert more transactions.

AI with an impact

Adyen have piloted their brand new AI-powered payment system with 60 enterprise businesses including Patagonia, Indeed, and Fubo, and increased payment conversion rates by up to 6% compared to legacy implementations.

On top of increased conversion rates, Adyen also expect transaction fees to reduce by up to 5%, as the AI is more efficient at selecting payment routes and minimising fees.

It is, sadly, not often we can say a new "AI-powered product" is driving significant impact and solving actual customer problems.

This is different. PMs, take notes.