--- title: "Alipay's Path to the Agent Era" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/287918299.md" description: "On May 26, Alipay launched its AI payment \"suite\" to enter the intelligent agent track, aiming to address payment and settlement issues in the AI era. Executives at Ant Group stated that while the use of agents remains limited, payment is the foundation of business operations, and Alipay hopes to seize the initiative in this emerging field. As AI has not yet achieved large-scale commercialization, the lack of a payment link restricts the realization of value circulation" datetime: "2026-05-28T12:26:32.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/287918299.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/287918299.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/287918299.md) --- # Alipay's Path to the Agent Era Alipay, which "built roads and bridges" during the internet era, is now working to clear bottlenecks in the AI era. On May 26, Alipay entered the currently hot intelligent agent track with its AI payment "suite." AI collections and payments, AI wallets, and Token Pay services were all unveiled, completing a payment system centered around Agents. **The "infrastructure maniac" makes its move. Alipay is betting on the growth of AI and Agents, their entry into households, and the inevitable need for payment and settlement links. Li Jiajia, Co-President of Ant Group's Digital Payment Business Group, told Wall Street News, "No business can operate without payment as its foundation." History has repeatedly proven this point through the rise and fall of commercial societies.** Currently, everyone is talking about Agents, but the number of people truly using them daily worldwide remains sparse, far from reaching every household. According to statistics from Sider.ai's founder, even in software engineering, the field with the highest Agent penetration rate, only 600,000 to 1 million people globally use them intensively each day, accounting for about 3% to 4% of the world's 27 million software developers; among the global white-collar workforce of 1 billion, the penetration rate is merely one in ten thousand. This is certainly not just a payment issue. The widespread adoption of Agents is still constrained by capability stability, task success rates, costs, user habits, and trustworthiness. However, a new commercial bottleneck is beginning to emerge: when Agents truly enter the transaction, fulfillment, and settlement stages, the existing payment system may not be fully capable of supporting this new role. A huge cognitive vacuum lies before us, and this is precisely the position Ant wants to secure in advance. Over the past two years, the most vibrant part of the AI industry has been models. Almost every few months, we witness a technological leap. But from the perspective of the business world, AI has not yet truly entered the stage of large-scale commercialization. Most AI today is more like a demonstration of capabilities. It can create value but has not yet truly participated in value circulation. And this is precisely a critical step in the business world. Ant Group pointed out to Wall Street News that without the payment link, the chain of value circulation cannot function. "I can volunteer my labor once or twice, but if there is compensation, it can spin like a flywheel, allowing for subsequent scale expansion." This situation is actually very similar to e-commerce twenty years ago. **Before the emergence of secured transactions, buyers did not trust sellers to ship goods, and sellers did not trust buyers to pay. The entire transaction chain lacked a trusted intermediary, so everything remained at a small-scale, low-frequency, acquaintance-based stage. Only after this bottleneck was resolved did strangers begin to dare to trade online for the first time, and e-commerce truly began to expand.** Today, the trust issues facing Agents are more complex. Users must trust that Agents will not spend money recklessly, merchants must trust that machine orders are real and valid, developers must trust that they will receive payment, and model providers must trust that Token consumption can be clearly measured and settled. It can be said that without payment and settlement, even the most powerful AI tends to remain at the tool level; only when value begins to flow does AI have the opportunity to truly become an industry. Especially for the Agent market, the future emergence of massive micro-transactions is driving the creation of new payment infrastructure. Unlike traditional e-commerce, transactions between AI agents may feature high frequency, small amounts, and automation. Data from Circle shows that the average AI agent payment is only $0.31 per transaction. The higher fees and delayed settlements of traditional payment networks make them uneconomical in some micro-transaction scenarios. **McKinsey predicts that by 2030, global B2C sales driven by AI agents will reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion. This blue-ocean market is calling for a payment solution better suited to the machine economy.** Clearly, this is a market rich in imagination. Top global players in the payment ecosystem, including payment companies, stablecoin institutions, international card organizations, and even hardware manufacturers, have all entered the fray, eager to get a share. For Alipay, it must also seize this new future gateway. Its strategy is to solve the trust problem first. A source close to Ant Group told Wall Street News: "Security has many layers. AI hallucinations exist in certain scenarios, but the payment part involves no AI. Payment requires extreme certainty and does not allow for 'generative' elements." He mentioned that this is why Ant is now emphasizing the ACT protocol. To ensure these information records cannot be tampered with, Ant is even considering introducing blockchain capabilities. Zhu Lin, General Manager of AI Payments at Ant Group, also mentioned to Wall Street News, "AntChain may play this role in the future to resolve trust issues." However, the truly complex aspect of the future AI era is not just payment, but multi-party collaboration. "Basic security and risk control on Alipay's side are definitely not an issue, but it will also extend further to upstream and downstream partners, different multi-sided networks, merchants, brands, Agents, and consumers. Everyone needs to operate within a single protocol to understand each other, or rather, to allow machines on all sides to interpret each other," said the aforementioned source. This means that what Ant wants to do now is not just a payment tool, but a set of commercial protocols for the AI era. Beneath the tip of the protocol iceberg lies Ant's ambition to build an ecosystem. **In Ant's view, what the AI industry truly lacks today is not just models, but an ecosystem. Because only when the developers behind Agents truly make money will the entire system form a flywheel.** Li Jiajia stated frankly to Wall Street News: "Currently, Alipay is focusing more energy on getting Agentic commerce moving within China's broader economic environment. Otherwise, all commerce will be limited to external coding and buying and selling Tokens, failing to create enough Agents." He mentioned that Ant is currently considering "not business, not revenue, nor competition, but how to accelerate speed. We are the leaders here, and our mission is to accelerate speed." Li Jiajia said, "Only when the providers behind Agents can generate substantial commercial value through paid methods will more people be willing to write such Agents; only when more people are willing to write such Agents will the Agent ecosystem prosper. Therefore, we must first solve the problem of Agents receiving payments." This is also the background for the emergence of Token Pay. Li Jiajia mentioned: "The approach to Token Pay is to allow all model providers to focus more energy on model refinement and improvement. They are not adept at selling Tokens to consumers, so we provide them with comprehensive Token Pay solutions to reduce their sales and operational costs." What truly needs to be solved behind this is not just the act of "selling Tokens." For model providers and Agent developers, handling payments, subscriptions, risk control, refunds, profit sharing, invoicing, and merchant systems for consumers constitutes a complete set of commercial infrastructure. What Alipay wants to provide is precisely the packaged capability of this infrastructure. As Agents begin to truly enter the transaction system, the business world itself will begin to change. An industry insider told Wall Street News: "Previously, the demands between users and merchants were not aligned. If the price did not meet the user's psychological expectation, the order might be lost." But with the emergence of Agents, this situation is starting to change. "Many people have their own psychological expectations for products. For example, if the original price is 10,000 yuan, I am willing to buy it for 7,000 yuan. So the user gives the Agent a task: notify me to buy it when the price hits 7,000 yuan," the aforementioned person mentioned. This is essentially a form of reverse group buying. Within Ant, this is seen as one of the most important changes brought by Agents. When Agents become a new role appearing between people, or between people and transactions or services, previously scattered and implicit demands will be released more definitively. **Of course, most Agent payments today are still in the early experimental stage. The so-called machine economy is far from entering the daily lives of ordinary people. Alipay's move at this time is more of an early bet on a possible future: when Agents evolve from conversational tools to transactional roles, the business world will need a new set of protocols for trust, authorization, settlement, and fulfillment.** **This is the path Alipay wants to take to reach the Agent Era.** It may not determine the speed of Agent adoption, but it hopes to build that bridge before Agents truly begin to create, distribute, and circulate value. Otherwise, AI will remain just a promise, difficult to cross over into a self-sustaining commercial system. 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