As agentic AI promises to take on the role of a personal shopper, Antom, a division of the Chinese financial giant Ant Group, has launched a new agentic payment solution for the Asia Pacific region. In a partnership with Mastercard and Visa, Antom is introducing tokenized, card-based agentic payments that would enable AI agents to complete payments with cards, bank transfers, and a wide range of digital wallets.
Antom says the technology is designed to provide a secure checkout process, an AI-ready payment mandate model, and enhanced risk management. Users can link their digital wallets directly to the checkout page without being redirected to external apps.
The platform lets payments flow naturally through conversations with AI agents, so purchases can be confirmed directly in chat. Shoppers can also arrange pre-authorized transactions such as spending limits or scheduled flash sales.
Financial Heavyweights
The new offering involves some of the biggest players in payments. Antom offers unified, vertical-specific digital payment solutions in support of more than 300 merchant payment methods. It operates in more than 200 markets and accepts payments in more than 100 currencies.
Mastercard’s Agent Pay and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platforms were unveiled in April of this year. They have spearheaded the technology that enables AI agents to effectively act as personal shoppers.
Concerns About Confidence
The appeal of agentic AI is easy to see. The technology has the potential to not only find items to purchase but also merchants from which to purchase and with the optimal form of payment. But industry analysts question whether AI is advanced enough to handle these transactions and to warrant consumer confidence in its abilities.
“If you’ve used AI, the answers that it returns are just as often wrong as they are right,” Don Apgar, Director of the Merchant Payments Practice at Javelin Strategy & Research, said in a recent PaymentsJournal podcast. “When you give a shopping agent a test to go find something and buy it for me, it’s not the buying part that worries me, it’s the finding the right thing. In today’s environment, you’ve also got AI hallucinations. It’s not everybody’s worst fear, but if you get a message that says, ‘Hey, I’ve bought this for you,’ it’s like, ‘Wait, who asked for that?’”
Beyond concerns about security or accuracy, one of the main barriers to agentic commerce is the need for active customer participation. The challenge for Antom will be whether it can persuade consumers to entrust their payment data to an AI agent and let it work on their behalf.
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