Alipay on August 17, 2026, launched what the Ant Group subsidiary calls China’s first full-stack agentic commerce platform, at its first AI Ecosystem Partner Conference in Hangzhou. In agentic commerce, autonomous software searches, compares, orders, and pays on a user’s behalf. Alipay’s launch targets the merchant side of that process, which so far has had the fewest tools.
“Agentic commerce is poised for rapid growth over the next 6 to 12 months. AI agents will become a new interface connecting hundreds of millions of users with tens of millions of merchants,” said Cyril Han Xinyi, CEO of Ant Group.
The platform makes storefronts readable by agents
A conversational agent cannot read an online store the way a person does. Product pages, catalogs, and checkout flows are built for a screen and a thumb, not to be called by a program. Until a merchant exposes its functions in a structured form, an agent has to interpret web pages, which is slow and error-prone. Alipay’s platform handles that conversion. It turns existing pages, product listings, and service flows into Skills, standardized units of action, and into tools in the MCP (Model Context Protocol) format, the open specification a large language model uses to call an external function.
- Merchants without AI capabilities: automatic conversion of the existing storefront, catalog, and service flows into Skills and MCP tools, with no prior technical rebuild.
- Merchants already using AI: agent creation, skill orchestration, task execution, and operations management.
- Shared resources: more than 200 specialized skill packages and industry-specific agent capabilities, according to Crowdfund Insider.
AHA carries payment, identity and risk into third-party agents
The second layer of the launch is AHA (Agent Hub Access), a protocol suite that connects agents with each other and across devices. It lets a merchant’s skills be reached from an agent other than Alipay’s and from a device other than a phone. Alipay cites smartphones, connected cars, AI glasses, and third-party AI apps. AHA bundles Alipay’s transaction building blocks: payment, identity verification, risk management, and order fulfillment.
That integration sets Alipay’s effort apart from the agentic protocols promoted by the card networks. Visa and Mastercard built their frameworks on delegating a payment mandate to an agent, without controlling either the buyer’s identity or the merchant’s logistics. Alipay already owns all four layers. It can handle customer authentication, transaction risk scoring, the account debit, and delivery confirmation in a single protocol.
Ah Bao, the consumer agent, sits downstream
The merchant platform feeds Ah Bao, the consumer agent Alipay launched in June 2026. Ah Bao gives conversational access to more than 10,000 everyday services across eight major categories, from paying utility bills to booking pet services or finding an electric vehicle charger. Luckin Coffee is among the integrated partners. As of August 2026, Alipay said Ah Bao was connected to five smartphone brands that together hold more than 70% of the Chinese market, and to 16 automakers.
Free compute and lower fees to bring merchants on board
Alipay paired the launch with an AI Business Incentive Program to populate the platform. Each business user gets 100 million free tokens, the unit in which large language model inference is billed. The program also offers subsidies for tokens generated through real transactions, reduced payment fees, and free access to 57 atomic business capabilities, including membership systems, merchant coupons, the Sesame Credit score, and leasing tools.
“In the age of AI agents, Alipay will continue to strengthen the infrastructure for industry-wide AI transformation and work with partners to build a thriving agentic commerce ecosystem,” said Jun Li, president of Alipay Business Group.
China builds from the merchant base, the West from the payment rails
The Chinese rollout runs in the opposite order from the Western one. In Europe and the US, agentic protocols started from the payment rails and are now trying to sign up merchants. Alipay starts from the merchants already connected to its wallet and adds an agent layer on top. Interoperability remains the open question. A proprietary protocol backed by the dominant wallet in its home market lets its operator alone set the terms on which third-party agents get access.