Alipay Turns 10,000 Merchant Services Into Agent Skills

Alipay rebuilt the storefront so an agent can shop it

At its first AI ecosystem conference in Hangzhou, Alipay unveiled a platform that does something subtle and large at once. It takes the ordinary building blocks of commerce, a merchant's pages, product catalogs, and service flows, and repackages them as standardized skills that an AI agent can call on its own, without a human tapping through an app. More than 10,000 services have already been adapted this way, across eight major categories, from brands including McDonald's, Luckin Coffee, Mixue, Didi, and the mapping service Gaode.

The architecture has three named layers. An AHA protocol suite handles how agents discover one another and reach across devices. An offering called Agentar supplies over 200 prebuilt skill packages and lets multiple merchants' agents collaborate on a single task. A consumer-facing agent distributes those merchant services out to whatever screen the user is on.

This is not a chatbot bolted onto a payments app. It is an attempt to build the plumbing that lets software agents transact directly with merchants, with Alipay sitting in the middle as the layer that standardizes and settles.

Why agentic commerce needs a protocol, not another app

For fifteen years, mobile commerce meant the app. A merchant's reach was a function of whether a customer had downloaded its app, opened it, and navigated it. Alipay itself was built on that model and profited enormously from it. The agentic version breaks that assumption. If an agent does the shopping, the merchant no longer needs the customer's attention inside an app. It needs its inventory and services to be legible to the agent, which means exposed as callable skills through a shared protocol.

That reframes the whole competition. In an app world, distribution is won through screen real estate and habit. In an agent world, distribution is won by being the protocol every agent speaks and every merchant publishes to. Whoever owns that layer becomes the intermediary for a large share of transactions without owning any of the inventory, the same position Alipay already holds in payments, extended one level up into discovery and fulfillment.

The timing claim is aggressive, and it is backed by scale rather than a demo. Ten thousand adapted services and two hundred skill packages are not a pilot. They are the beginning of a supply side large enough for agents to have something real to do. Ant Group has reason to believe the demand is there too. Its AI Pay and AI health assistant each passed 100 million users earlier this year.

The quiet move from apps to cars, and what Alipay is protecting

The most revealing detail is not on the phone. Alipay lined up 16 automakers and a roster of device makers including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Honor, alongside the Alibaba-backed Qwen model family. Alipay's business group president framed the shift plainly, saying service entry points are moving from single applications toward a broad array of devices.

That is a defensive move dressed as expansion. Alipay's dominance was tied to the smartphone app being the center of Chinese digital life. As agents spread to cars, appliances, and voice interfaces, the app loses its monopoly on being the place commerce happens. By making itself the commerce layer across all of those surfaces now, Alipay is trying to ensure that when the entry point stops being its app, the transaction still runs through its rails. It is disrupting its own model before someone else does.

There is also a competitive signal for the labs and platforms elsewhere. In the United States, agentic commerce is being assembled piece by piece, with payment networks acquiring routing layers and model makers adding checkout. China's version arrived as a coordinated stack, launched with hundreds of merchants and device partners already committed. The contrast is not about which technology is better. It is about which market can mobilize the supply side faster, and a single dominant payments platform convening merchants and automakers at once is a structural advantage the fragmented Western market does not have.

What merchants and agent builders should watch

For merchants, the tradeoff is familiar from the app era. Publishing your services as skills on Alipay's platform buys instant reach into an agent ecosystem, at the cost of deepening dependence on the intermediary that already sits on your payments. For agent builders, a standardized supply of ten thousand real services is the missing half of every agent demo, which usually has a capable model and nothing genuine to transact with.

The launch is early, and adoption at conference scale is not the same as daily use. But the direction is now explicit. Alipay is betting that the storefront of the next decade is not a page a person visits but a set of functions an agent calls, and it is spending its merchant relationships to make sure it owns the switchboard between them. The company that taught China to pay by phone is now trying to make sure the phone was never the point.