- Han Xinyi says AI agents are moving from answering questions to handling real transactions and connecting consumers with merchants
- Alipay expects more natural forms of AI-driven payment to account for more than half of transactions within five years
Ant Group CEO Han Xinyi (韩歆毅) said agentic commerce has reached its “ChatGPT moment,” as AI agents move beyond generating answers and content to helping consumers make purchases and access real-world services.
Speaking at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai on September 11, Han said the key shift is from demonstrating what AI agents can do to allowing them to complete real transactions.
He cited Alipay’s AI assistant Abao (阿宝), which entered public testing in June.
Users can ask Abao to handle tasks such as finding an affordable restaurant for five people within a 200-yuan budget or planning a trip to Shaoxing and buying high-speed rail tickets, he told the conference.
Such requests combine budgets, preferences, timing and expectations for fulfillment, effectively expressing a transaction intent before a purchase is made, the business leader noted.
From search to intent
Han said this could change the starting point of commerce from standardized products and fixed app pages to user intent. Merchants would compete not only for traffic and physical locations, but also to become services that AI agents can accurately understand and reliably recommend and fulfill.
The shift could also reshape payments. Zhu Lin (朱林), general manager of Ant Group’s AI payment business, expects more natural forms of AI-driven payment to account for more than 50% of transactions within five years, while payments through a wider range of smart devices could grow tenfold.
The three questions
For agentic commerce to scale, Han said the industry needs to solve three problems: how services can be understood and accessed by AI agents; whether agents can complete transactions on users’ behalf; and who authorizes and takes responsibility for those transactions.
That requires demand, supply, payments, risk controls and fulfillment to work as a single chain, rather than as separate parts of the digital-commerce system.
“When agents start spending money for you,” Han said, agentic commerce can evolve from a payment mechanism into a broader commercial ecosystem.
The bigger test for Alipay now is whether its AI assistant can turn that vision into everyday transactions — and persuade merchants and consumers to let agents act on their behalf.
Header image credit: Ant Group
