AI|Alipay’s AI Wallet and Token Pay a big bet on the future by Ant Group

Chinese fintech giant Ant Group is betting its future on a world where smart glasses are able to autonomously order, customise and pay for your coffee before you even step into a cafe. The Hangzhou-based company on Tuesday launched a new suite of artificial intelligence payment tools, aiming to position its ubiquitous Alipay network as the foundational transaction infrastructure for an emerging wave of autonomous AI agents capable of shopping, booking services and completing payments on behalf of users. The roll-out represented a “full-stack” AI solution designed to ease the payment process for AI model developers, retail businesses and everyday consumers in the AI era, according to Ant Group. As part of this ecosystem, the company introduced two flagship products. The AI Wallet is a consumer-facing interface within the Alipay app designed to let users monitor, manage and authorise tasks carried out by AI agents before, during and after a transaction. Meanwhile, Token Pay is a specialised business-to-business product engineered for AI model providers to seamlessly handle subscription models, in-agent token top-ups and complex micro-transactions. “Alipay is building a new generation of AI payment services to accelerate the growth of the agentic commerce ecosystem,” said Cyril Han Xinyi, CEO of Ant Group. “Agents execute payments, while tokens carry value,” said Han at a Tuesday afternoon corporate conference, explaining the essence of AI Pay. Ant Group is an affiliate of the Alibaba Group, which owns the South China Morning Post. The move marks Ant’s latest attempt to dominate the transaction layer of the emerging “agent economy” – where AI services evolve from merely answering text prompts to independently executing real-world tasks. The technology is already moving past the conceptual stage. Alipay said its AI payment services have been tested across a variety of hardware and software ecosystems, including Alibaba’s Qwen app, where users can complete their purchases via AI-assisted interactions. Its AI payment services have also been used in AI glasses and smart cockpits, as well as retail and enterprise scenarios such as Luckin Coffee, ByteDance’s AI development platforms Coze and Qoder, and “one person companies” run by solo entrepreneurs According to Ant Group, its preliminary AI Pay product surpassed 100 million users in February and has successfully processed over 300 million transactions to date. But as AI takes the wheel on consumer spending, security remains a major hurdle. To combat user anxiety about autonomous spending, Ant Group also unveiled its Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, which aims to create a “common language” for collaboration between AI and service platforms. On the developer side, Chinese AI unicorns MiniMax and Stepfun have signed on as early adopters of Token Pay, using the infrastructure to manage token distribution, membership subscriptions and targeted marketing campaigns.