Alipay AI Pay Reaches 100M Users, Shaping Shopping

AI Pay just crossed 100 million users, turning chats into checkout.

Alipay disclosed that its AI Pay product, built to enable payment within AI-driven conversations, has surpassed 100 million active users, with weekly transactions topping USD 17.47 million. The milestone marks a transition from a proof-of-concept experiment to a mass-adoption feature in China’s daily digital life. The company frames this as the dawn of “conversational shopping” (对话式购物) — a mode where users can complete purchases without leaving the chat interface. During the Lunar New Year period, orders spiked, underscoring consumer appetite for chat-initiated commerce in fragmented, on-the-go usage windows. In parallel, Alipay says its core Tap-to-Pay ecosystem, the offline arm of its payments empire, now serves more than 200 million users, illustrating a broad online-to-offline (O2O) payment continuum.

The core message from Alipay Technology Co., Ltd. is that the AI Pay experience will migrate beyond smartphones. Future use cases emphasize hands-free authorization via voice commands, with payments potentially flowing through smart devices and wearables, including AR-enabled scenarios on smart glasses. The company’s strategic outlook points to payments becoming embedded in a wider hardware ecosystem, not just a mobile app.

The numbers illuminate a broader shift in China’s consumer payment landscape. A hundred million active users cover a wide swath of ages and urban-rural mix, suggesting that conversational interfaces are now a routine channel for everyday purchases, small and large. The Lunar New Year surge signals a period when frictionless digital interactions become especially valuable as households coordinate gifts, groceries, and travel. The 200-million Tap-to-Pay milestone suggests that offline spend is not leaving the digital wallet behind; rather, Chinese shoppers are moving seamlessly between screens and storefronts, often in the same shopping session, with AI Pay serving as the connective tissue.

From a domain perspective, this development has meaningful implications for supply chains and consumer-facing procurement. For manufacturers and suppliers operating in or with the Chinese market, AI Pay’s expansion tightens the integration between chat-based shopping and real-time payments, potentially accelerating order placement and reducing cart abandonment in consumer-facing channels. It also deepens the ecosystem effect: when a chat bot can authorize a purchase and trigger downstream fulfillment, you’re essentially embedding procurement into a conversational workflow. For global manufacturers eyeing China, the takeaway is clear — any service or product sold domestically that wants to ride this wave should consider native wallet interoperability and partnerships that expose procurement workflows to Alipay’s conversational layer.

Two practitioner-informed takeaways emerge. First, payment friction is a critical constraint in many B2C and B2B procurement scenarios. The ability to complete a chat-driven purchase within the same interface can raise average order value and reduce cycle times, especially for small-ticket, recurring consumables used on the factory floor or in retail channels. Second, the device play is as important as the chat. The push into voice-assisted payments and AR-enabled interfaces means suppliers and OEMs should prepare for a future where parts orders, service contracts, and rapid replenishment are initiated via voice or visual cues on a wearable or smart device — not just a phone app. That convergence raises questions about data governance, security, and device-level authentication, all of which China’s digital-payment regulators are watching closely.

Alipay’s path also underscores the structure of China’s tech landscape. Alipay remains the payments arm closely associated with Ant Group — a private, high‑profile platform with deep regulatory visibility and state-facing obligations. The rapid expansion of AI Pay and Tap-to-Pay illustrates how privately run platforms can become quasi-infrastructure, shaping consumer behavior and supplier interfaces across the entire supply chain. For executives assessing sourcing and supplier strategy, the signal is clear: align with domestic wallet ecosystems, prepare for cross-device procurement flows, and monitor regulatory developments as these capabilities move from novelty to standard operating practice.

Sources

Alipay’s “AI Pay” Surpasses 100 Million Active Users, Ushering in the Era of Conversational Shopping