Risk management in ecommerce is entering one of those moments where the ground shifts a little under everyone’s feet, and Riskified seems determined to make sure the industry is at least talking about it together. The company has confirmed that Ascend, its flagship global summit, will return in 2026 as a true multi-region series, moving deliberately across North America in May, Europe in June, Australia in August, China in September, and Japan in October. The idea is less about a single annual spectacle and more about meeting merchants where they operate, pulling together each region’s largest ecommerce players, practitioners, and technology leaders to unpack how AI, fraud, and customer experience are colliding in very real, sometimes uncomfortable ways.
At the center of the announcement is a tone that feels both confident and slightly uneasy, which is probably appropriate given the subject matter. According to Jeff Otto, Riskified’s Chief Marketing Officer, the same technologies that have powered fraud prevention for over a decade are now reshaping commerce itself, with agentic systems making decisions, initiating payments, and redefining responsibility along the way. That tension runs through Ascend 2026’s framing: AI is no longer just something that blocks bad actors at checkout, it’s something that predicts behavior earlier, rewards trusted customers more intelligently, and forces teams to rethink who actually owns risk when software starts acting on behalf of shoppers.
The North America edition sets the tone for the entire series, taking place from May 4–6, 2026 at Conrad New York Downtown in Manhattan. The setting feels intentional, right in the middle of a city that understands scale, speed, and consequences. Over multiple days, the agenda moves through how intelligence is becoming something that has to operate continuously across the customer journey, not just at the final payment step. Conversations will dig into how global fraud signals can be translated into instant action, how emerging threat vectors are being intercepted earlier than ever, and how explainable AI is becoming a necessity rather than a nice-to-have when decisions affect revenue, trust, and internal accountability.
One of the more provocative threads woven into Ascend 2026 is the question of responsibility in agentic commerce. As AI systems increasingly initiate or influence transactions, traditional lines between merchant, platform, issuer, and technology provider start to blur. The summit plans to confront that ambiguity head-on, looking at how liability, conversion optimization, and risk ownership are being rewritten in practice, not just theory. Alongside that, sessions focused on checkout orchestration and policy management reflect a broader shift away from blunt, one-size-fits-all controls toward dynamic systems that can distinguish loyal customers from abusers in real time, with humans still shaping strategy rather than chasing alerts.
Taken together, Ascend 2026 reads less like a product showcase and more like a working forum for an industry that knows it can’t afford to be passive anymore. By stretching the event across continents and grounding discussions in real merchant experiences, Riskified is positioning Ascend as a place where intelligence is translated into action, and where the uncomfortable questions about AI, risk, and trust are at least put on the table. It feels like an attempt to slow things down just enough to think clearly, before the next wave of automation speeds everything back up again.
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