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Alipay has completed an AI upgrade for its "Tap" product, rolling out AI enhancements to more than 30 million offline touchpoints nationwide, bringing new benefits to both everyday users and business operators.

1. Core upgrade details: Alipay has retrofitted its existing 1 million-plus commercial Tap-enabled hardware into Tap AI Agents, and launched two supporting products: the Tap Anything Agent service platform for small and medium-sized merchants, and an open AI infrastructure for developers.

2. Improved user experience: Users can tap an offline device with their smartphone to directly activate corresponding AI services. Beyond accessing coupons and joining marketing campaigns, users can one-tap access services across multiple scenarios including cultural content, tourism, transportation, healthcare and government services. For example, tapping at Hangzhou East Railway Station pulls up parking and ride-hailing information, while tapping at a Shanghai social security center enables instant service processing, delivering a much more streamlined workflow than traditional methods.

3. Optimized transaction experience: The upgrade completes a full closed-loop workflow from AI activation, service delivery to AI-powered payment. Alipay’s AI-powered payment volume has already exceeded 300 million transactions, and the end-to-end process is lightweight, secure and well-regulated.

The AI upgrade of Alipay’s Tap product provides brands with new AI-powered business tools, helping them connect online-offline operational closed loops and adapt to emerging consumer trends.

1. Upgraded brand marketing and operations: Brands can integrate Xiaoyu, Alipay’s merchant AI agent, to directly access a full suite of operational capabilities including Alipay subsidies, government consumption coupons, precision member management, hit product campaigns and traffic distribution. Through simple conversational interactions, Xiaoyu automatically pulls operational data and generates marketing plans, streamlining operational workflows.

2. Expanded channels and scenarios: Alipay’s offline Tap AI network already covers dozens of sectors including food service, retail supermarkets, tourism, hotels and transportation. Leading brands can release industry-specific solutions tailored to their businesses, and launch new Tap-enabled interactive products to reach more offline consumers.

3. Higher conversion rates: Brands can connect the full Tap-merchant AI agent-AI payment workflow, and leverage Alipay’s AI marketing toolkit to capture user demand for pre-sales, flash sales and repeat purchases, effectively boosting conversion and retention in AI-enabled scenarios.

The AI upgrade of Alipay’s Tap product brings a low-barrier opportunity for all types of offline sellers to enter the AI era, and outlines a clear path for new growth.

1. Built-in traffic and user base: In two years since launch, Tap has accumulated 400 million users and deployed more than 30 million offline AI touchpoints across dozens of common business sectors. Sellers can leverage this network to gain more offline traffic and connect their online and offline operations.

2. Low-barrier access for small and medium sellers: Small and medium sellers without in-house technical development capabilities can directly use the Tap Anything Agent service, which provides end-to-end support from AI marketing material design, smart material recommendation and ordering to full-time data operation and settlement. This effectively gives sellers access to a professional operations team at low cost.

3. Built-for-purpose operational tools: Sellers can integrate the Xiaoyu merchant AI agent to enable multi-terminal synchronization; they can launch marketing campaigns through simple conversational commands, and access official subsidies and traffic tools to reduce operational complexity. The open ecosystem also allows sellers to build custom services tailored to their specific needs, further improving operational efficiency.

The AI upgrade of Alipay’s Tap product creates new business opportunities for manufacturing factories, and provides actionable insights for factories advancing digital transformation.

1. New order opportunities: Alipay has already deployed more than 30 million offline AI touchpoints for Tap, and the network continues to expand. Market demand for Tap-related hardware and customized materials is growing steadily, which will drive steady increases in supply chain order volumes. Factories can capture this new incremental demand to expand their business.

2. Adapt production and design to new demand: Tap’s AI service can automatically match merchant需求 from more than 300 material specifications. Factories can optimize their product specification systems and production processes to better serve small-batch, customized material demand from small and medium merchants, strengthening their market competitiveness.

3. Insights for digital transformation: This upgrade breaks down barriers between offline physical scenarios and AI services. Factories can replicate this model to advance digital and AI transformation across their production and distribution channels, leverage AI capabilities to handle fragmented orders from small and medium merchants, cut operational costs, and expand their business scope.

The AI upgrade of Alipay’s Tap product clarifies new development trends for the offline business service industry, and brings new business opportunities for service providers.

1. New industry trend: AI is now moving from online to offline physical scenarios, and AI-powered operations for offline merchants have emerged as a major new growth trend. With more than 300 million AI-powered payment transactions and over 30 million offline AI touchpoints covering dozens of sectors, the market size of offline AI services will continue to expand.

2. Core customer pain points: All offline merchants, from large brands to small businesses, face high barriers to AI transformation. Small and medium merchants lack technical expertise and professional operational capabilities, while large brands require more efficient end-to-end AI operational tools, creating strong market demand for low-barrier offline AI services.

3. Opportunities and solutions for service providers: Alipay has built an open offline AI operational network, providing service providers with multiple components including lightweight SaaS integration, SaaS AI agents and merchant operational skill development tools. Service providers can build industry-specific AI operational services based on Alipay’s open AI infrastructure, meet demand from a huge base of offline merchants, and rapidly scale their own business.

Alipay’s AI upgrade for Tap offers valuable actionable insights for offline commercial platforms exploring AI transformation, and clarifies core merchant demands from platforms.

1. Core merchant demands: Offline merchants have strong demand for low-barrier AI-enabled digital operations. They need mature, ready-to-use marketing, operational and payment tools to lower the barrier to implementation, and also expect platforms to provide development support to reduce their own technical investment costs.

2. Actionable platform operating practices: Alipay has adopted a tiered service model that offers tailored products for different groups: it provides end-to-end AI-covered Tap Anything Agent service for small and medium merchants without technical capabilities, a virtual resource supply platform for developers to access development resources in one stop, and a conversational merchant AI agent for brands, to meet demands across all tiers of users.

3. Risk mitigation guidance: Platforms rolling out offline AI can adopt a gradual upgrade path: first build out underlying infrastructure, expand scenario coverage incrementally, then roll out feature upgrades. Platforms should also keep their ecosystem open, and partner with stakeholders across different sectors to co-deliver scenario solutions, which accelerates ecosystem expansion while diversifying deployment risks.

The AI upgrade of Alipay’s Tap represents an important new development in the AI transformation of offline physical industries, and its new model offers significant reference value for industry research.

1. New industry development: This upgrade marks a major breakthrough in deploying AI technology in offline physical scenarios. It is the first to break down the boundary between the physical world and AI Agents, and builds an offline AI operational network with over 30 million offline touchpoints, marking that AI commercialization has expanded from online to offline and entered a new stage of development.

2. Innovative business model: The exploration has resulted in a tiered open ecosystem business model that delivers tailored services for different customer groups: it provides end-to-end AI services for small and medium merchants without technical capabilities, open AI infrastructure and development resources for developers, and ready-to-use skill-accessible AI agents for merchants, while partnering with ecosystem players to co-develop industry solutions and build a complete operational closed loop.

3. Research insights: This model solves the core pain point of high barriers to AI transformation for offline merchants, validates the feasibility of offline AI interactive entry points, provides a new path reference for AI transformation across the entire physical industry, and has also spawned new research directions including offline AI interaction and offline AI operations.