China’s tech giants are done just talking about AI.

Last week, Alibaba (BABA) upgraded its Qwen chatbot so users can complete real transactions inside the chat.

Ordering food, booking flights, paying without leaving the interface.

This is wired directly into Taobao, Fliggy, and Alipay. Before this, Qwen only pointed users to products. Now it closes the loop.

That shift marks the real arrival of agentic commerce in China. Not chatbots that recommend. Agents that act.

Tencent is close behind. Tencent has been clear that AI agents will become core to WeChat. With more than a billion users already messaging, paying, shopping, and booking services inside WeChat, the surface area for automation is enormous.

ByteDance is also pushing fast. Its Doubao agent is already booking tickets through Douyin commerce links. Even a short lived prototype phone showed how aggressively these firms want agents embedded at the device level.

The disruption behind the news: AI agents are rewriting how commerce happens.

Agentic commerce combines decision making, execution, and payment into a single flow.

For consumers, it kills friction.

No comparison shopping across apps. No cart abandonment. No checkout screens.

The agent decides, executes, and pays. Once trust is established, human involvement drops sharply. Every step removed increases conversion.

For platforms, this is about locking behavior, not just users. If an agent handles your flights, meals, utilities, and subscriptions, switching costs explode.

Alibaba has an early edge because it controls the full stack. Model, marketplace, logistics, and payments. All of that matters. An agent that can see inventory, prices, delivery times, and your payment credentials in one place will always beat a bolt on assistant.

The numbers make the direction clear. In China, super apps already account for the majority of mobile payments. Injecting agents into that flow can easily shift 10 to 20 percent of discretionary spending into automated purchases over the next two years.

U.S. firms like OpenAI, Amazon, and Google are circling the same idea, but they are boxed in. Fragmented data. Stricter consent rules. No dominant super app. China is not.

What to watch next

First, watch default settings.

The real battle will be over how much autonomy agents get out of the box. Suggest versus execute is the line that matters.

Second, watch merchants.

Small sellers will follow agents because agents deliver demand. Expect commission pressure to rise as platforms charge for agent prioritization.

Third, watch regulation.

Once agents can spend on your behalf, disputes shift from refunds to liability. Whoever sets those rules will shape the market.

Finally, watch consumer behavior.

When people stop browsing and start delegating, brand power weakens. Price, speed, and availability win.

This is about software that controls how money moves, not AI chatbots. Whoever owns the agent owns the transaction. Alibaba (BABA) has a Disruption Score of 1.

Click here to learn how we calculate the Disruption Score.