At the recent 2026 Inclusion·Bund Summit, a roundtable discussion titled "New Possibilities in Agentic Commerce" brought together key industry figures to explore the evolving role of payments in the age of artificial intelligence. Participants included Fu Qiang, Head of Growth and Commercialization Technology at Kimi; Tristan, Founder of Natural Selection; Zhao Penglan, Senior Partner at BAI Capital; and Lin Zhengmao, Director of AI Payments at Ant Group. From the distinct perspectives of model development, entrepreneurship, investment, and payments infrastructure, they tackled a central question: as intelligent agents increasingly execute commercial activities, what does payment truly signify in the AI era, and is its value being underestimated?

Lin Zhengmao argued that the fundamental logic of payments has shifted in the AI era. "A person only needs to express an intention or goal and grant the agent the necessary authorization. From there, the agent can handle everything related to finding products, placing orders, and completing the payment on the user's behalf."

Fu Qiang provided a concrete example from Kimi's subscription service. He described a scenario where "a user could simply speak a few words through a local model or another interface to continuously access our services without interruption," illustrating how conversational AI can streamline the payment experience.

Looking further ahead, Zhao Penglan shared a more ambitious vision for the future of payments. "I hope that one day I won't even need to instruct the system; it will automatically secure an iPhone 18 Pro for me before I can even think about it." However, he emphasized that the more significant development lies in payments generated by agents when they autonomously execute tasks, a concept he dubs "silicon-based life payments."

Zhao Penglan highlighted the impracticality of human-scale transactions in an automated world. "If you tried to make 500 payments in a single minute using your personal credit card, it would likely be frozen by the next day." He pointed out that the high-frequency, low-value, and even millisecond-level micropayments emerging in the AI era represent a brand-new payment scenario that did not exist before.

Zhao Penglan also noted that payments have always been a business characterized by strong network effects. In the agentic age, as individuals may command dozens or even hundreds of their own agents, the total number of agents could explode to an estimated "100 billion to 500 billion." This proliferation, he argued, would unlock entirely new forms of commercial value.

Tristan added that the network effects in the agent era could be "epically amplified." He explained that while traffic has always existed because human attention remains perpetually scarce, the ownership of that traffic is changing. "In the past, platforms controlled the flow of traffic; in the future, the entry point will become the user's own agents."

Lin Zhengmao further elaborated on the changing dynamics for merchants. He observed that previously, businesses acquired customer attention through branding, advertising, and traffic acquisition. "In the future," he stated, "merchants will need to earn the trust of intelligent agents. Only by gaining that trust can an agent be persuaded to recommend and invoke their services."

This shift, Lin Zhengmao concluded, creates a new set of challenges and barriers. He clarified that the focus is no longer on "simply adapting existing payment interfaces to work with agents." Instead, the industry must integrate the very identity of the agent, the execution of payments, and transactional records into a unified, trustworthy transaction chain to ensure security and reliability.