Ant Group's Alipay used its first AI ecosystem conference in Hangzhou on August 17 to roll out China's first full-stack commercial foundation for agent-driven business, alongside the AHA (Agent Hub Access) protocol suite for multi-agent, cross-device coordination. The move packages merchant tooling, interconnection protocols, and a hardware partner network into one system aimed squarely at everyday commerce run by autonomous agents.
Highlights#
- The commercial foundation targets merchants first. Alipay's AI open platform converts existing web pages, product catalogs, and service processes into standardized Skills and MCP protocols that agents can invoke directly. Merchants with their own AI teams get Agentar ecosystem edition tooling for building agents, arranging skills, and running multi-merchant, agent-to-agent operations with more than 200 specialized skill packages.
- The AHA protocol suite is the connective tissue: intelligent interaction standards, agent interconnection protocols, and device perception and execution frameworks. A single spoken or typed request can chain together multi-agent collaboration, secure fulfillment, and transaction settlement, with domain-specific authorization and data isolation keeping trust boundaries between agents from different vendors.
- Distribution is the quiet headline. Alipay partnered with 20+ terminal makers, automakers, and model developers including Qwen, Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, BYD, Geely, NIO, and Li Auto. Its Abao agent covers five smartphone brands with over 70 percent market share and 16 automakers, with more than 10,000 services already AI-adapted since invite-only testing began in June.
- Ant Group CEO Cyril Han Xinyi said agentic commerce is poised for rapid expansion within six to twelve months, with agents as new intermediaries linking hundreds of millions of consumers to millions of businesses.
- Adoption incentives include free compute tokens, reduced payment rates, transaction subsidies, and no-fee access to 57 atomic business capabilities including membership systems, coupons, and Sesame Credit.
Why it matters#
Western coverage of agentic commerce focuses on payment rails; Alipay is building the entire stack, from merchant supply to device entry points to settlement, under one operator. For agent-to-agent commerce, the AHA protocol's domain-specific authorization and trust boundaries between vendors' agents are the same problems escrow and reputation systems solve elsewhere.