(Yicai) Aug. 18 -- Agentic commerce is expected to experience explosive growth in the next six to 12 months, according to a prediction by the chief executive officer of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group.

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence agents continue to improve, they will become a new interface connecting users and merchants, Han Xinyi said at Alipay's AI Ecosystem Partner Conference in Hangzhou yesterday.

AI agents will enhance the efficiency of matching user demands with products, so that many fragmented needs that were previously overlooked can be activated, leading to an expansion of the overall market, Han noted.

Moreover, AI agents will introduce new divisions of labor and value distribution, shifting from "traffic entry points" to "depth of understanding" and "quality of fulfillment," which will spark the emergence of more business opportunities, he added.

Alipay launched its first full-stack agentic commerce platform aimed at supporting merchants in the era of AI agents at the AI Ecosystem Partner Conference. It also revealed that its super service AI agent Abao has completed the AI integration of more than 10,000 services, including five major mobile phone brands and 16 leading carmakers.

Moreover, Alipay unveiled the first cross-end interconnection AHA protocol system for AI agents, collaborating with partners, such as Qwen, Huawei Technologies, Oppo Mobile Telecommunications, Vivo, Honor, BYD, and Geely Automobile Holdings, to establish an interconnected ecosystem for AI agents.

AI agents can help payment providers move beyond traditional competition based on transaction fees, Guo Tao, angel investor and senior AI expert, told Yicai. By leveraging AI agents to deeply integrate into various stages of the purchase process, such as consumer decision-making, product filtering, price comparison, and order placement, payment services can shift from being a back-end tool to playing a role at the front end of purchase decisions.

This transformation positions AI agent payment as a critical tool for payment providers to establish the next-generation transaction entry point, Guo noted.

For agentic commerce to truly achieve scalability, it is essential to enhance merchants' operational efficiency while developing value for users, Guo pointed out. "The challenges payment providers face are quite real," he added. "If merchants cannot see tangible benefits, their willingness to participate will quickly diminish."

The potential for agentic commerce is vast, but to turn the "explosive growth" from prediction to reality, the industry still has much work to do, Guo believes.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione