On July 8, the official of Alipay announced that it would "touch" to complete the full dimension AI upgrade. The offline devices of millions of merchants have been fully iterated into "Touch Device Agent", and a "Touch Everything Agent" service platform for small and micro merchants and an AI open base for developers have been launched simultaneously. By overlaying the previously implemented full stack AI payment system and AI assistant "Abao", a complete offline AI commercial closed loop covering hardware touchpoints, intelligent scheduling, and transaction settlement has been formed.

In two years, 'Touch One' has accumulated 400 million users, more than 2300 ecosystem service providers, and over 30 million offline AI touchpoints. This group of data not only means the growth of product scale, but also means that Alipay has the opportunity to solve the core proposition of the industry in the AI era: breaking the barriers between the digital world and the physical world, so that AI is no longer just an online dialog box, but a real general business platform. As a result, AI is stepping out of the laboratory and landing in diverse business scenarios, rooted in the capillaries of the real economy.

30 million touchpoints welcome AI upgrade

For a long time, the biggest bottleneck of AI landing in physical commerce has not been at the model level, but rather the lack of offline interaction touchpoints - the vast majority of intelligent agents are only active online and cannot directly reach real physical scenes such as stores, travel, and government affairs. There is an insurmountable "last mile" gap between digital and physical.

Since its launch in 2024, Alipay "Touch One" has completed the laying of tens of millions of offline contacts in two years, covering catering, supermarket, scenic spots, charging, exhibition and other industries, and has built a distributed intelligent node network of domestic leading merchants. In this AI upgrade, Alipay has installed AI brain for offline hardware: Xiaoyu, the first "touch device agent" for businesses in the industry, was launched simultaneously at multiple terminals such as "touch" devices and mobile phones.

Xiaoyu connects the entire payment, membership, and traffic distribution chain, with built-in standardized business tools such as government consumption subsidies, store explosive product marketing, Gaode store exposure, and Taobao flash purchases. Merchants can complete store data analysis and marketing activity implementation through voice dialogue, providing a one-stop solution to long-term pain points such as weak data capabilities of offline merchants, fragmented online and offline customer flow, and lack of marketing channels.

More importantly, this network maintains its open nature. Alipay has opened SaaS integration, agent building, business function development components to service providers and developers across the industry, which will further release AI productivity. Cao Cao Charging, Tushan Charging, Shenzhou Zhaobao, Shunwang Technology, Umbrella Technology, Noxing Technology, China Post and other enterprises have launched new products based on "touch to touch" interaction, such as intelligent charging for ride hailing cars, e-sports intelligent warehouses, solar AI intelligent umbrellas, portable WiFi, intelligent postcards, etc. The deep integration of "touch" and AI capabilities is helping to form a prosperous offline business ecosystem.

'Touching Everything' Agent: AI Admission Ticket for Small and Medium sized Businesses

Top chain brands can independently build digital systems, but a massive number of street side small shops and individual merchants face greater challenges in the digital wave - a lack of technical teams, design and operation capabilities, and a lack of budget for system renovation. How can small and medium-sized businesses, like large enterprises, enjoy the dividends brought by AI digitization? Alipay's solution is to create a "touch everything agent" service platform tailored for small and medium-sized businesses to help them fill the short board of AI transformation.

This service integrates three major integrated AI capabilities to provide one-stop service for businesses' full process business needs: AI creative designers automatically generate beautiful and high conversion offline promotional materials; AI intelligent manufacturing experts match over 300 material specifications to achieve rapid production implementation; AI Touch Manager is available 24/7 and is responsible for data tracking, intelligent analysis, and revenue settlement. Merchants do not need to master professional skills in coding, design, and operation. They only need to propose business needs, and the entire process can be automatically implemented by AI.

From payment convenience to AI management, the evolutionary logic of "touching" the three-level jump

'Touching' has entered its third year, and the development path of these three years has formed a clear progressive logic, becoming a typical example of offline interactive entrances continuously amplifying commercial value.

In the first year, with optimizing payment efficiency as the core, relying on "pay as you go" to simplify scanning operations, and quickly cultivating the habit of using it among the whole population, the digital transformation of the transaction process is completed; In the second year, we will move away from a single payment function and extend our services to public service areas such as culture and tourism, transportation, and government affairs, transforming from transaction tools to offline comprehensive service entrances; In the third year, fully integrate into the AI intelligent agent system, connect online agents with offline physical scenes, and complete the qualitative change from "service entrance" to "AI management hub".

Users only need one touch of their mobile phone to activate the merchant's intelligent agent, automatically calling services such as consumption coupons and membership marketing, covering diverse scenarios such as cultural and creative, medical, and travel. Unlike traditional AI that relies on long links of text dialogue box interaction, "touch" completes human-computer interaction with lower physical touch thresholds, opening up a new path for AI popularization applications.Previously, Hangzhou East Railway Station launched the "Hang Xiaodong" intelligent agent, which can intelligently view parking information and ride hailing updates; The Shanghai Social Security Center has launched a "touch to touch" service, entering the era of seamless and direct "instant touch", which is a widely praised example.

Up to now, the number of AI payment transactions on Alipay platform has exceeded 300 million, and AI transactions are increasingly becoming the choice of many businesses. Haier and other brands have taken the lead in opening up a complete transaction link from "touch" to "AI payment": users "touch" to arouse agents, agents explain recommended products and answer questions, and finally users complete authorization and payment through Alipay "AI payment". This mode realizes the AI driven whole process of customer acquisition, transformation and transaction.

At the same time, on the payment side, Alipay AI launched the AI Marketing Suite, which allows businesses to launch their own personalized services based on relevant basic capabilities to meet the diversified needs of users such as pre-sale, rush purchase, and repurchase, and improve the conversion and retention rate of users. Alipay has also launched a virtual resource supply platform for business developers. Developers only need to submit their development needs when developing AI applications, and they can call cloud resources, APIs and skills in a one-stop manner, so that they can easily access Alipay's AI payment capabilities and efficiently complete application development.

Anchoring physical scenes, stepping out of the new paradigm of AI landing

The current focus of AI competition in the industry is changing, shifting from simply competing for large model parameters and cloud based dialogue capabilities to more competing for offline real-world scenarios and physical touchpoints. Most intelligent agents still focus on online digital scenarios and have not moved towards the real economy; Alipay, on the other hand, relies on a mature offline contact network to complete AI reconstruction and create a differentiated AI landing path: different from pure online intelligent assistants and single intelligent hardware, it highly integrates AI agent capabilities and intelligent hardware, and applies them to a rich business landscape.

In practice, this path has received a large number of responses from merchants. Green City, Amber, Fenjiu, Sinopec, 31 Conference, Haier, Penguin and other partners have successively released "touch" industry solutions under the AI business scenario, embracing AI management through "touch", which is becoming a universal industry consensus.

From a broader perspective, a set of AI infrastructure for physical commerce is composed of 30 million distributed offline AI touchpoints, intelligent agent services tailored to small and large merchants, and a complete commercial closed loop for payment transactions. It breaks away from the inherent idea of pure online digitization and embeds AI capabilities into every real scenario of store management, livelihood services, and offline transactions, using physical networks to bridge the boundary between digital intelligence and the real economy.

The core inspiration of this landing path is that the value of the AI industry is being validated in the operation of physical commerce. Ant uses offline touchpoints as carriers to deeply integrate intelligent agents, payment, and marketing capabilities, allowing AI to step out of dialogue boxes and laboratories, truly becoming a universal productivity that can be implemented in the physical business field. This model also provides a reference and replicable industrial sample for the deep integration of AI and the real economy.