Alipay Just Published The Agentic Commerce Blueprint

I’ve had the same discovery call four times in two months. Leadership teams rarely ask the question the same way, but we end up in the same place. They want to know what agentic commerce means for them.

There are two business roles in the agentic commerce economy. You’re either the agent that reads customer intent, or you’re a service that the agent calls. Even if your ‘service’ makes and delivers the product, to the agent it’s just a service that can serve its user’s intent.

The intent-facing agent has pricing power, while the ‘service’ competes on price and gets swapped out the minute that something cheaper or that ships faster shows up. Most businesses will fall into the service role unintentionally. They’ll wait for the market to settle, and while they wait, someone else will build the customer-facing intent surface.

Once you’re behind that surface, it’s like being on social media. The platform can crush your reach at any time for any reason. You don’t own the connection to your customers unless they come to the intent surface and specifically ask for you. Most don’t.

Your agentic architecture enables or limits your business’s future. It is an instrument of strategy. It is, in large part, determined by the opportunities your business’s leadership chooses to go after. Technology and the business’s growth or decline have never been so interdependent.

In this article, I’ll explain how the companies building the intent or action surface are paying for it, why the smart ones are giving it away, and what you need to do in your category or domain before ‘the road,’ as Alipay calls it, gets finished.

I’ll use Alipay as the example because they published a clear vision for what’s next, and they have tested it for the last couple of months. The approach generalizes, but agentic commerce will be one of the first to see it delivered. Their approach also follows my frameworks for agentic platform monetization, so to offset my biases, I wrap up this post with a list of risks and what could still go wrong.

Han Xinyi, Ant’s CEO, said, “Every technological revolution builds the roads and facilities of its era, and Alipay’s role is to pave that road.” This is a new picks-and-shovels play at the next layer down. We saw it work with compute hardware, then models, and now we’re seeing it emerge at what used to be the app layer. But what Alipay is building is very different from the traditional app layer.