At the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Summit main forum, a roundtable discussion titled "When Agents Become Transaction Participants" brought together key industry leaders. Ant Group Co., Ltd. CEO Han Xinyi joined Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert, OPPO's Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer Liu Zuohu, and Alibaba Group's Chief Scientist Zhou Jingren to explore the industrial shifts emerging as intelligent agents enter consumer, transaction, and payment scenarios.
During the discussion, Han noted that his interactions with merchants over the past six months have revealed a strong demand for new growth opportunities in the AI era. Many businesses are eager to participate in the agent economy but remain uncertain about how to transform their services into capabilities that can be invoked and completed by intelligent agents. He observed that the current supply and demand sides of the agent ecosystem have yet to form a positive cycle.
"Users want to use agents, but merchants lack quality agent services; merchants see few users engaging, so they hesitate to invest in developing agents," Han explained, describing the situation as a classic "chicken-and-egg" dilemma. He characterized Ant's role on the eve of the agent era as that of a "catalyst," focusing on two key areas: first, addressing security and trust concerns, and second, driving the formation of a self-reinforcing loop within the agent supply-demand ecosystem. Han expressed Ant's ambition to help more merchants develop agents, ensuring their services are discoverable, usable, and continuously improved through real usage, thereby propelling the commercial agent ecosystem forward.
Han predicted that if individuals eventually manage multiple agents, society will witness the emergence of large-scale interconnected agent networks, unlocking new business opportunities and driving corresponding transformations on both the supply and demand sides. He pointed out that future commercial traffic may shift from "time spent" to "user intent." Traditionally, merchants competed around exposure, dwell time, and conversion rates; in the agent era, users may simply articulate their needs, with personal assistant-style agents matching services and completing transactions on their behalf. Marketing strategies will likewise pivot from traffic acquisition to delivering precise, intent-driven services.
Agents could also broaden the scope of service supply. Many experienced professionals have historically been limited to offering services based on personal capacity, constraining their reach; if large language models and agents can convert expertise into replicable, scalable service offerings, new opportunities could emerge in lifestyle services and professional sectors. Han also revealed that Alipay's "Abao" will introduce incentive policies for agent development, encouraging developers to create functional, user-friendly agents while providing corresponding incentive gateways for users to express new needs. This approach aims to connect genuine user demand with developer and merchant service supply.
Han emphasized that as agents execute tasks on behalf of users and touch payment interfaces, a new trust infrastructure is essential. He outlined several key mechanisms: first, authorization, clarifying what users permit agents to do; second, identity, extending beyond traditional user (KYC) and merchant (KYB) verification to include "know your agent"; third, capability assessment of agents, enabling personal agents to judge whether merchant agents can adequately meet user needs; fourth, a financial security framework encompassing anti-fraud and risk control measures; and finally, traceable, auditable mechanisms to attribute responsibility when transactions encounter issues.
"Whether the error stems from user authorization, the personal agent's misunderstanding, information transmission failures, or merchant execution problems," Han stated, the chain of responsibility must be retroactively traceable and assessable once agents participate in transactions. He concluded, "Ultimately, time is needed for people to build trust and confidence—not in the technology itself, but in the very concept of having an agent execute tasks and handle payments on their behalf."
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