China’s Alibaba and ByteDance Embrace Agentic Commerce

Big Tech companies in China like Alibaba and ByteDance are adding agentic commerce to their arsenal, CNBC reported Wednesday (Jan. 21).

Alibaba updated its consumer-facing Qwen AI chatbot last week with new features letting users order food, book travel and complete in-chat payments. It’s a sign of a shift among AI firms from an emphasis on foundational AI models to agentic AI, which carries out tasks on behalf of users with limited supervision, the report said.

“The agentic transformation of commercial services enables the maximal integration of user services [and] enhances user stickiness,” Shaochen Wang, a research analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in reference to stronger long-term user engagement, per the report.

ByteDance, meanwhile, introduced an upgraded version of its Doubao AI chatbot last month that can autonomously handle tasks like ticket bookings via integrations with eCommerce features on Douyin, the Chinese version of the company’s TikTok, the report said.

Tencent President Martin Lau said on an earnings call last year that AI agents could become a central part of the company’s WeChat ecosystem, according to the report.

While companies like Alibaba and ByteDance are employing agentic AI for travel reservations, the technology can also be useful for travelers at the end of their hotel stay, PYMNTS wrote this week.

“Despite years of investment in wallets, stored credentials and one-click flows, guest checkout has had its pain points,” the report said, citing PYMNTS Intelligence research showing that 60% of middle-market merchants report at least one user-experience problem during checkout.

“In agentic commerce, the consumer is no longer the primary operator of checkout,” the report said. “Software agents select products, compare prices and initiate payment. Wallets, which depend on consumer attention and explicit selection, may become less central.”

Also this week, PYMNTS wrote about the use of agentic commerce in B2B payments, saying that these payments could appear ripe for agentic automation. Invoices come in, contracts lay out terms, and systems monitor due dates. But beneath these surface signals are deeper layers of intent that are often ambiguous.

“The question confronting enterprises is not whether software can initiate payments autonomously, but whether organizational intent can be articulated with sufficient clarity and discipline to allow such autonomy without compromising control,” PYMNTS wrote Monday (Jan. 19).

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.