China's First! Alipay Teams Up With Qianwen App, Taobao Flash Deals to Launch AI Commerce Protocol ACT

On the morning of January 16, Alipay, in collaboration with partners including the Qianwen App, Taobao Flash Deals, Rokid, Damai, and Alibaba Cloud's Bailian, officially launched the ACT protocol (Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol). This initiative is reported to be China's first open technical protocol framework designed specifically for Agent commercial needs, creating a "universal language" for the collaboration between AI and service platforms like e-commerce and food delivery, thereby making cross-terminal, cross-system, and cross-platform AI task execution more convenient and efficient.

Taking the Qianwen App as an example, leveraging the ACT protocol, it has successfully integrated with Taobao Flash Deals and Alipay's AI Pay. Users simply need to give an instruction like "Order me a pearl milk tea" to Qianwen. The app then intelligently recommends nearby products that meet the demand based on the user's location, while simultaneously completing price comparisons and the automatic verification of coupons. With just a click on "Choose it" and confirmation of payment via Alipay, the user can complete the checkout process in one step. The entire shopping journey progresses in a conversational, automated manner without switching apps, transforming Qianwen into a personal "shopping assistant" that handles all the tedious operations.

It is understood that Alipay has established four core infrastructure standards for this protocol: the "Delegated Authorization Domain," "Commercial Interaction Domain," "Payment Service Domain," and "Trust Service Domain," ensuring that the entire AI operation process is traceable and verifiable. Unlike traditional payment models, under the ACT protocol framework, the AI only acts as the executor of the ordering operation, while the payment step remains user-initiated or requires explicit user authorization. This approach significantly saves users' time while ensuring fund security. For merchants, when integrating with AI-native applications in the future, they only need to configure unified interfaces according to the protocol standards to connect with all channel entry points, eliminating the need for complex, separate API development and substantially reducing integration costs.