How will people buy things when it is an AI agent doing the buying?
That is the question at the heart of the latest episode of Finance Chief Uncut, the flagship podcast of Finance Chief, featuring Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International. In a conversation Yang sat down with host Matt High to unpack agentic commerce — the shift in which consumers and businesses increasingly delegate research, decisions and payments to AI agents.
The trend is already visible in how people search the web today. "You may want to make the purchase decision on the same platform," Yang notes, as users increasingly turn to AI assistants for research rather than serach engines - a behavioural shift that businesses cannot afford to ignore. "That's the reason why people begin to talk about Agentic Commerce, because that's a natural move according to the user behavior change."
Yang argues the commercial case will crystallise in the enterprise first. Because B2B tasks have clear, measurable objectives — user acquisition cost, inventory and delivery times, revenue and margin — it is easier for a merchant to determine whether an agent genuinely adds value. "I feel like it's the B2B where the AI will come faster and will potentially become workforce," he says, while noting that agentic B2C "is eventually going to happen" as the foundations are built.
With agents transacting on behalf of people, trust becomes the defining question: who is the agent, what is it authorised to do, and whose responsibility is it when something goes wrong? Yang points to Ant International's collaboration with Mastercard and Visa on the KYA interoperability framework, ensuring the trust layer is "a consistent framework which eventually benefits everybody" across both card and mobile ecosystems — so an agent is verified once and can be used across different payment apps.
To protect merchants during the transition, he highlights AgentSafePay, an industry-first agentic-protection product with a 100% money-back guarantee against agent malfunctions arising from LLM hallucinations.
The building blocks are already in place. Through AMP — the Agentic Mobile Protocol — Ant International's open protocol for agentic mobile payments, the company is collaborating with 10 top partners and reaching 1.5 billion users within four months of launch, built on the Alipay+ foundation that connects over 50 partners and more than 2 billion users globally.
"It goes without saying!" is how Yang laughs off Matt High's praise — but his closing vision is serious. "I believe the future of payments will be fully embedded into your entire decision-making process… you just decide how you want to live. A smart, strong agent will ensure the payment is processed automatically for you according to your plan—worry-free, fully protected, and 100% aligned with your original intent."
The full conversation is available on Finance Chief and across Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Acknowledgment: Ant International would like to thank Finance Chief Uncut and the Finance Chief editorial team — and host Matt High — for the invitation and production of this episode.
About Finance Chief Uncut
Finance Chief Uncut is the executive podcast series of Finance Chief, a flagship publication of global B2B media group BizClik. Hosted by editor Matt High, the series features long-form conversations with senior leaders in finance, technology and AI — with past guests including executives from Coinbase, National Bank of Canada, Alteryx and AtData — reaching a global audience of C-suite executives and digital decision-makers across BizClik's network, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
About Ant International
Ant International helps businesses to thrive through a full stack of AI-native payment, account, foreign exchange, treasury and growth solutions, underpinned by our trusted foundation models, security architecture, blockchain RTP platform and a world-leading mobile payment ecosystem. We drive relentless innovation to bring inclusive growth for merchants and communities of all sizes, today and tomorrow. To learn more, visit https://www.ant-intl.com/.
