Alipay has officially unveiled its Open AI Platform, concluding a three-month effort to build an artificial intelligence-based commercial infrastructure. This launch is the culmination of a series of releases that began with full-featured AI-powered payment products in May and the release of Abao, an AI-adapted version of Alipay, in June.
The platform, launched in July, is geared towards sellers. It allows businesses to package their services as plugins, skills, or agents that can be activated by AI assistants across various devices, including phones, cars, and other smart terminals.
The core problem the platform solves is how services will be discovered and transacted in an AI-driven world. Traditional search is giving way to calling an AI agent: users simply tell the assistant their needs, and it independently selects and executes the required service. The Alipay AI Open Platform positions itself as a central hub for cross-terminal connectivity, standardizing how sellers provide their services for AI consumption, as well as serving as a mechanism for secure discovery and transaction of these services by AI agents.
Among the first companies to connect to the platform are KFC, Mixue Bingcheng, Luckin Coffee, Amap, Didi, and Wansuishan Wuxiacheng. These partners cover sectors such as food delivery, transportation, travel, and lifestyle services.
The platform is built on two key protocols. The first is the ACT 2.0 Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, developed by the IIFAA Internet Trust Alliance in collaboration with over 20 partners, including Zhipu AI. The second protocol is the Agent Hub Access protocol, which enables service invocation between different devices and applications, and it is standardized within the MIIT AI Agent Interconnect framework.
The significance of this launch goes beyond simply releasing one platform. Alipay has effectively created a transactional layer for the nascent agent economy. Three modules released over three months—payments, user input, and seller offerings—form a complete interaction cycle. Users interact through Abao or third-party AI assistants, sellers showcase their services via the Open Platform, and Alipay manages payments, trust, and settlements through the ACT protocol. This creates a unified commercial infrastructure to which other AI platforms can connect.
Alipay President Li Jun described the platform as a reliable and secure foundation for future agent network interactions. The benefit for sellers is clear: they only need to connect to the platform once to cover all AI endpoints, rather than creating separate integrations for every AI assistant, smart terminal, or device ecosystem. For users, a single natural language command allows them to find, compare, and transact with multiple providers without needing to open separate applications.
Nevertheless, the platform faces significant challenges. AI agents must consistently understand user intent to offer appropriate services. Trust mechanisms must correctly handle transaction failures or incorrect service delivery. Furthermore, the economic model of agent-mediated discovery fundamentally differs from advertising-based models, and it remains unclear whether sellers can earn revenue from investments in agent channels comparable to traditional search and recommendation channels. Despite these open questions, the Alipay AI Open Platform represents the most comprehensive attempt by any Chinese internet platform to create a commercial infrastructure for AI-based agentic commerce.
Youzu Interactive has integrated artificial intelligence agents into 75% of its staff using Tencent Cloud WorkBuddy. This integration allows the game development process to be transformed, from coding to global marketing analysis.
Youzu Interactive, one of China's pioneering foreign publishing companies that has shown international revenue exceeding domestic revenue for the past 11 years, has reached an AI agent penetration level of over 75% of its employees. CTO Wang Junzheng describes this transformation as providing each employee with their own AI agent, while the company covers all computational costs and provides unlimited access to 47 different models.
The company's journey in AI began in 2023 with the use of Stable Diffusion for image generation, and in 2024 with GitHub Copilot for coding assistance. A turning point came in August 2025 when OpenAI demonstrated an agent capable of creating a million-line product from scratch. By early 2026, agent-based tools, including Tencent Cloud WorkBuddy, were implemented across the entire company.
Currently, AI agents operate within three key business scenarios. The first is industry analytics: agents automatically collect information from multiple sources, perform sentiment analysis using large language models, and provide structured results. Youzu developed a bot with instant broadcasting functionality that delivers important industry updates to employees daily, supplemented by a portal for collecting community information.
The second scenario relates to advertising material production. Since advertising materials are the main channel for attracting users for a global gaming company, the previous creative creation process was linear and sequential: trend identification, scriptwriting, storyboarding, modeling, post-production, and editing. A delay at any stage affected the entire cycle. Now, AI covers most of this chain, significantly reducing the time from concept to first draft. However, the final decision on compliance with regional specifics, game genre, and target audience still requires human expertise.
The third scenario is operational data analysis. Although long-running games generate continuous streams of data, obtaining user metrics traditionally required waiting for report templates or coordinating time with analysts. Youzu implemented ChatBI, which allows business teams to ask questions in natural language. Recently, the company packaged the data platform capabilities into tools that business teams can install and run directly within their agents, enabling self-service in data analysis without engineering intervention.
Youzu has completed the transformation of four internal systems using AI, with another seven or eight in progress. The company also uses the WorkBuddy expert group feature, which brings together specialists from different fields into collaborative teams. Wang tested an expert group for content creation that was able to prepare a complete video based on a text prompt in just 20 minutes. According to Youzu's 2025 financial report, revenue from overseas markets grew by 8.06% year-over-year, and the company attributes part of this growth to the integration of AI technologies, which increased gross margin by 2.46 percentage points.
