Staking their bets on the agent business, payment institutions are scrambling for the "entry point"

The payment sector is scrambling to seize the new entry point of intelligent agent business, but still faces multiple challenges.

A "entry point" competition sparked by the rise of agent-based commerce is quietly unfolding in the payment industry. Payment institutions at home and abroad have started to seize this new "entry point" one after another. Outside China, card organizations such as Visa and Mastercard are committed to integrating agent payment capabilities into a wide range of business scenarios; in China, large payment institutions including Alipay and UnionPay are also actively building a broader agent-based commercial ecosystem.

Xu Jin joked that KFC is a technology company "delayed" by its fried chicken business.

As the overall head of KFC's digital business, she led the launch of AI (Artificial Intelligence) ordering on the KFC App last year, and jointly launched Agent ordering with "Abao" under Alipay this year.

Xu Jin told reporters that the main purpose of KFC upgrading AI ordering to agent ordering is to better serve three groups of customers: nearly 500 million households, about 300 million car owners and the vast number of young people in China.

"During the ordering process, they all have their own pain points. For example, when a family orders food, some people like spicy food while others do not, making it hard to cater to all tastes; car owners cannot use their mobile phones to order while driving; young people like to try new things, but they do not know what new dishes and new set meals KFC has launched," she told reporters. KFC hopes that when these users say they "want to eat KFC", the agent on the mobile phone or the In-Vehicle Infotainment System can quickly judge their tastes and dietary preferences based on their past purchase records, and accurately recommend KFC dishes, allowing them to complete the order quickly and easily with just "one sentence".

Xu Jin revealed that if the agent ordering function achieves good results at KFC, Yum China will have greater confidence to expand this AI agent business to other catering brands such as Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Little Sheep, Huang Ji Huang, and Lavazza Coffee.

This reinforces the judgment of Han Xinyi, CEO of Ant Group: driven by the resonance of improved AI capabilities, upgraded user demands and the formation of a closed-loop business value, agent-based commerce will see an outbreak in the next 6 to 12 months.

He believes that when agents become the "new carrier" between hundreds of millions of people and tens of millions of merchants, a new business format centered on intent is taking shape, which will bring higher user conversion rates and more considerable incremental revenue and profits.

"It is not a re-division of the existing stock cake, but incremental revenue and profits created jointly by new supply, new demand and new division of labor," said Han Xinyi.

The reporter noticed that a "entry point" competition sparked by the rise of agent-based commerce is quietly unfolding in the payment industry. Payment institutions at home and abroad have started to seize this new "entry point" one after another. Outside China, card organizations such as Visa and Mastercard are committed to integrating agent payment capabilities into a wide range of business scenarios; in China, large payment institutions including Alipay and UnionPay are also actively building a broader agent-based commercial ecosystem.

Demand Drives the Market

Up to now, Hive Box Technology has more than 400,000 sets of smart lockers, covering 236,000 communities and over 480 million users.

However, these figures bring "happy troubles" to Xu Bin, CEO of Hive Box Technology — whether the extensive business layout can make the daily active user ratio (DAU) and user penetration rate reach 5% and 10% respectively to meet the expectations of investors.

Initially, Hive Box Technology promoted its services through short video platforms and social media, hoping to improve user conversion rate and smart locker utilization rate, but the results were not satisfactory.

By chance, Xu Bin found the solution.

Xu Bin saw someone using Alipay's "Tap to Pay" feature to pick up parcels at Hive Box directly, which changed the original multi-step process of "scanning the code first, entering the password, and finally confirming the parcel pickup". This made him realize that the intelligent, fast and convenient operation process might be the key to encouraging users to use smart lockers.

Therefore, he began to popularize the "Tap to Pick Up" parcel pickup service for smart lockers.

As a large number of elderly users who like online shopping but are not familiar with complex mobile phone operation processes have got used to picking up parcels via the "Tap to Pick Up" method, the DAU of Hive Box Technology rose rapidly, increasing from 1% to about 6.5% in a short period of time.

"At that time, I did not realize the huge commercial value behind it," Xu Bin revealed. Until one time, he asked the agent on his mobile phone "where can I get my dirty shoes cleaned", and the agent directly replied: you can first put the dirty shoes into the Hive smart locker, a dedicated person will take them to the store for cleaning, and after cleaning, the shoes will be sent back to the Hive pickup locker, and he only needs to pick up the shoes and take them away.

At this moment, Xu Bin suddenly realized that in the AI era, the "home-side service" entry point for the public is changing, and a physical network is needed to support it. Smart lockers are one of the high-frequency entry points, which can connect with agents to complete a large number of people's life services and create considerable incremental revenue.

Therefore, Xu Bin decided to cover AI services in every Hive Box community within the next two years, and build a more extensive home-side service agent-based commerce system.

Ding Wei, Senior Vice President of Huangshan Tourism Development Co., Ltd., is also interested in building agent-based commerce.

Data shows that in 2025, the number of tourists visiting Huangshan Scenic Area exceeded 5 million. Ding Wei found that more than 85% of them were individual tourists, who generally faced problems such as lack of planned tour routes, inability to find outlets for scenic spot explanation services, and failure to book hotels, accommodation and catering in time.

Initially, Ding Wei spent three years integrating various data of Huangshan cultural tourism, developing a large Huangshan cultural tourism model to provide tourists with various travel guidelines. He soon found that what the vast number of individual tourists urgently need is not only travel guidelines, but also various affordable and diverse travel packages such as "scenic spot + accommodation" and "scenic spot + surrounding facilities".

Ding Wei began to build agent-based commerce for Huangshan tourism scenarios: tourists only need to tell the agent their travel time, travel preferences, accommodation and catering requirements, consumption budget, etc., and the agent can quickly formulate a travel itinerary for them, recommend suitable scenic spots, hotels and restaurants, and tourists can directly authorize the agent to place orders for hotels, scenic spot tickets and catering services.

"Up to now, our intelligent ticket purchasing service has completed a total of 3.269 million orders with a transaction volume of 420 million yuan. In the future, we will gradually expand agent-based commerce to services such as companion tour explanation and scenic spot photo taking," Ding Wei revealed.

Seize the Entry Point

Li Jun, President of Alipay Business Group, is also making every effort to seize the "new outlet" of the outbreak of agent-based commerce.

Since the beginning of this year, on the one hand, he has promoted the open test of "Abao", the agent under Alipay, which has completed intelligent adaptation of more than 10,000 services, covering eight scenarios including travel hailing, catering ordering, and cultural tourism scenic spots; on the other hand, he has promoted cross-device interconnection between "Abao" and many mobile phone and automobile manufacturers.

He told reporters that a sound agent-based commerce system cannot rely solely on AI agents, and it also needs to connect a large number of software, hardware and merchants.

"This is a win-win situation for all parties," Li Jun told reporters. For manufacturers of smart glasses, smart watches, smartphones, automobiles and other products, equipping their products with agent-based commercial functions can enable these products to respond quickly and accurately to various life service needs of users, which helps to improve user stickiness and purchase willingness.

For merchants, agent-based commerce provides a definite path to access AI, make better use of AI, and achieve more efficient and intelligent business growth with the help of AI, so as to obtain higher user conversion rate and incremental revenue.

Li Jun revealed that up to now, "Abao" under Alipay has realized cross-device collaborative service capabilities with 5 mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, its in-vehicle services cover 16 mainstream automotive brands, and it has reached designated cooperation with more than 60 automotive enterprises; emerging terminals such as smart glasses and watches are also being deployed synchronously. In addition, McDonald's, Mixue Ice City, Luckin Coffee, AutoNavi Hailing, Didi, Deppon Express, YTO Express, Hive Box and other enterprises have successively accessed "Abao" to launch agent-based commercial services.

"On the whole, the access demand of merchants is quite active, and some development demands have been scheduled to next year," Li Jun said. Payment institutions also need to provide differentiated agent-based commercial operation services according to the AI capabil...