In a keynote address at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai, Ant Group Co., Ltd. CEO Han Xinyi declared that the "ChatGPT moment" for agent commerce has officially arrived. He highlighted that the pivotal shift is agents moving from "capability demonstration" to "real transactions," meaning they are no longer just tools that answer questions or generate content. Instead, agents are evolving into new commercial gateways that understand user needs, connect with real supply, and facilitate the completion of transactions.
Han observed that user behavior is undergoing a transformation. While ChatGPT in late 2022 gave the global public its first tangible experience of the leap in natural language human-computer interaction, the defining change for agent commerce is that users are now entrusting agents with real-life tasks and needs. When user behavior changes, the starting point of business changes as well. Previously, commerce began with standardized products and fixed pages, relying on advertising, exposure, and traffic operations to reach users. In the era of agent commerce, business will begin with user intent, dynamically organizing supply, matching services, and completing transactions around what users genuinely want to accomplish.
The future competitive landscape for merchants will not be limited to traffic and placement, but will center on whether they can be accurately understood by user agents and recognized as the most trustworthy, most compatible, and most reliable service providers. On August 17 of this year, Han had already projected at the Alipay AI Ecosystem Conference that agent commerce would explode within six to twelve months.
Zhu Lin, General Manager of AI Payments at Ant Group, provided data indicating that with the explosive growth of the AI industry and the proliferation of intelligent terminals, more natural new interactive payments are expected to account for over 50% of transactions within the next five years, while payments via diverse smart devices are set to grow tenfold. Han noted that to drive the large-scale development of agent commerce, the industry must answer three fundamental questions: how services can be understood and invoked by agents; whether agents can help users complete transactions; and if transactions do occur, who provides authorization, who manages risk, and who bears responsibility.
Han emphasized that when agents take action, they must address several key issues: whom the agent represents, what the authorization boundaries are, whether transactions are secure, how fund safety and fraud risks are managed, and how responsibility is defined if problems arise. He explained that the value of AI payment lies not in simply enabling agents to spend money on behalf of users, nor is it just automatic deduction. Rather, it serves as a trusted commitment engine within agent commerce, ensuring the entire process is authorizable, manageable, controllable, and traceable. This allows users to confidently delegate, encourages merchants to integrate, and enables platforms and service providers to jointly build a sustainable ecosystem.
At the event, Han announced that Alipay would establish a development fund of 10 million yuan for life-oriented agent developers, with a maximum individual annual award of 1 million yuan. Han stressed that agent commerce is not something a single enterprise can accomplish alone. Alipay hopes to work together with merchants, service providers, and partners to make supply understandable, invokable, and fulfillable, turning industry experience into reusable intelligent capabilities. "When agents start spending money for you, the agent commercial ecosystem will transform from a mere payment system into a thriving and abundant commercial ecosystem, and its emergence moment will truly arrive," Han concluded.
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