On January 16, Alipay jointly with Qwen App, Taobao Flash Sale, Rokid, Damaic, and Alibaba Cloud Bailing, officially launched the ACT Protocol (Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, the Agent Commerce Trust Protocol). This is China's first open technical protocol framework designed for agent commercial needs, creating a "common language" for the collaboration between AI and e-commerce, food delivery, and other service platforms. It makes cross-terminal, cross-system, and cross-platform AI task execution more convenient and efficient.
Take Qwen App as an example, relying on the ACT Protocol, Qwen App successfully integrated Taobao Flash Sale and Alipay AI Pay: users just need to issue the command "Please order a pearl milk tea" to Qwen. Based on the user's location, Qwen intelligently recommends nearby products that meet the needs, and automatically compares prices and applies coupons. Users only need to click "Select it," confirm the Alipay payment, and complete the checkout in one click. The entire shopping process proceeds in a conversational, automated, and non-switching manner, with Qwen acting as a personalized "shopping assistant" that handles all tedious operations.
As AI capabilities continue to expand, moving from "chatting" to "handling tasks" such as shopping and payments, new issues have emerged: has AI operation received clear user authorization? Is the financial transaction process sufficiently secure? Can the service experience remain consistent after switching devices or applications?
The creation of the ACT Protocol aims to solve these problems. Alipay has built four core infrastructure standards for it: "Delegation Authorization Domain," "Commercial Interaction Domain," "Payment Service Domain," and "Trust Service Domain," enabling full-process traceability and verification of AI operations, making people feel more secure; supporting automated transaction processes, reducing unnecessary manual interventions, and improving service efficiency; unifying multi-platform service standards to avoid fragmented experiences.
Different from traditional payment models, under the framework of the ACT Protocol, AI only plays the role of executing orders, while the payment process is always controlled or authorized by the user. Under the premise of ensuring fund security, it saves users a significant amount of time. For merchants, in the future, when connecting to AI-native applications, they only need to configure a unified interface according to the protocol standards, which allows them to connect to all channels without needing complex API development individually, greatly reducing the cost of connection.
Currently, the ACT Protocol can be applied to various scenarios such as AI shopping and enterprise automation procurement, and offers two payment modes: one is instant payment, where users and AI converse in real-time, make decisions based on the recommendation list, and authorize and verify their identity after confirmation, suitable for high-frequency scenarios like AI ordering takeout and daily shopping; the other is delegated authorization, where users can pre-set conditions such as time windows, spending limits, and merchant ranges, allowing AI to automatically monitor product dynamics and complete orders and settlements even when offline, suitable for scenarios like flight and hotel bookings.
The protocol maximally follows three principles: compatibility, privacy, and openness, fully compatible with existing commercial and payment systems, and continuously optimized alongside AI industry technological development. Alipay also stated that it is actively promoting more payment service providers, merchants and platforms, AI developers, and smart terminal ecosystem manufacturers to join, jointly improve the protocol content, and build a new AI commercial trust ecosystem.
With the continuous enhancement of AI-native application capabilities, "AI assistance" services are becoming increasingly popular. Payment, as a special and critical link, has become the focus of global tech companies. Previously, OpenAI collaborated with Stripe to launch a protocol to support ChatGPT checkout functions; recently, Google also released the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an AI shopping全流程通用商务协议, which will allow users to place orders directly within Gemini.
