Ant International Rolls Out 100 AI Updates and Builds Infrastructure for Agentic Payments

Ant International, the parent company of Alipay, has announced approximately 100 AI product updates in a single release cycle. A Forrester blog post by Principal Analyst Meng Liu details the company's two-horizon strategy: deploying AI agents to reduce today's payment friction, while building payment infrastructure capable of supporting autonomous agent-to-agent transactions.

Key Takeaways

• 89.5% of Ant International merchants have adopted Autopilot, the company's AI agent for payment operations, indicating high rollout velocity across a large installed merchant base.
• Ant has developed an agentic payment chain with an interoperability framework backed by Visa and Mastercard, designed to support AI-to-AI payment flows as autonomous agents become more common in commerce.
• The company's strategic direction moves from a payments platform model to an AI platform monetization model, with AI services becoming a direct revenue source rather than an enhancement to payment processing.

Forrester's Meng Liu highlights the Visa/Mastercard interoperability framework as particularly significant: building the infrastructure for agent-to-agent payments now positions Ant International ahead of a commercial pattern that has not yet become mainstream. The 89.5% merchant adoption rate for Autopilot suggests the company is converting its existing payment network into an AI adoption channel.

Read the full article on Forrester