Alipay has just announced that its AI Pay payment solution, enabling secure and seamless transactions between AI agents, exceeded 120 million transactions in the past week, as agentic commerce volume surges in China.
Launched in 2025, as a way to let people place orders and complete payments entirely through natural language with an AI assistant, Alipay AI Pay has quickly expanded into various use cases, including AI agents in apps and mini programs for brick-and-mortar retailers like Luckin Coffee.
This AI-driven payment platform has also been incorporated into the tech stack of AI smart glasses like Rokid. In December 2025, Alipay collaborated with Rokid to enable developers integrate AI payment directly into the AI agents they build on Rokid’s Lingzhu platform. Based on the available MCP model, developers can access the AI payment capabilities and deploy them on smart devices seamlessly through natural language instead of using complex coding. This, in turn, creates a convenient in-agent payment experience for consumers.
In January 2026, following the lead of global tech providers, Alipay launched the Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol with partners, including Alibaba’s consumer-facing AI application Qwen App and Taobao Instant Commerce. Qwen App became the first platform to adopt the Protocol, connecting with Taobao Instant Commerce and Alipay’s AI payment service. Users can now simply chat with Qwen App’s AI to place food and beverage orders directly within the App.
As digital services evolve in this AI era, and agentic commerce is being tested within different environments and apps, Chinese consumers are among the most active adopters globally. The China enterprise agentic AI market, which includes agentic commerce and payments within broader enterprise applications, generated about $193 million revenue in 2024, and is projected to reach around $1.94 billion by 2030. This suggests a 47.5 % annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2025 to 2030 — one of the fastest in AI segments globally.
As the technology use grows, local consumers are developing new expectations for convenient and intelligent payment methods applicable in AI-powered commerce environments. Alipay, that has been pushing boundaries of payment innovation for years, strives to facilitate emerging agentic transactions as well as improve existing human-driven payment flows.
In addition to AI payment service, Alipay launched Alipay Tap! in 2024, an innovative contactless payment and customer engagement solution, that recently reached a 100 million daily transactions milestone. Users simply unlock their phone and tap it against a merchant’s payment terminal or the Alipay Tap! tag — no app launch, no scanning, and no navigating multiple screens required. This simplified experience has been embraced by younger users, older adults, and people with visual impairments. The service is also available to international visitors, who can link international debit or credit cards to Alipay and pay like a local while traveling in China. Its rapid rise of popularity illustrates how tap-based payments promote access to everyday services.
To boost the service even further, Alipay is now also expanding Tap! to wearables through partnerships with companies such as Xiaomi, Rokid, and RayNeo. On AI smart glasses, users can look at a blue Alipay Tap! ring and activate payment with a voice command, such as “help me pay”, confirming and completing transactions hands-free.
Since its launch, more than 200 million consumers have used Alipay Tap! for services, including daily payments, restaurant ordering, unlocking shared-bikes, parcel collection, and instant tax refunds.
