According to Forbes, Ant International, the Singapore-based global payment leader, is making huge 2025 bets on AI agents and tokenization. Its AI agent for merchants, Antom Copilot, just got major upgrades to manage the entire payment lifecycle. The company’s in-house AI model, Falcon, has already processed a staggering $1.5 trillion in transactions this year with over 90% accuracy, cutting foreign exchange costs by 60%. It’s also deploying a powerful risk-management AI called SHIELD that boasts 95% precision in spotting high-risk transactions. On the partnership front, Antom is working with Google on a new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and piloting with Mastercard and Visa. CEO Peng Yang emphasized that this tech push, including new iris authentication for smart glasses, aims to democratize innovation, especially for emerging markets.
The quiet shift to agentic commerce
Here’s the thing: everyone’s talking about AI chatbots, but Ant is focusing on AI agents that can actually do things. That’s a big difference. An “AI payment companion” that can navigate different payment methods, handle mandates, and manage assets isn’t just answering a question—it’s executing a complex, multi-step financial operation. This is Ant trying to own the plumbing for the next era of commerce, where your AI assistant buys things for you. By co-developing protocols like AP2 with Google, they’re not just building a product; they’re trying to set the standard. If they succeed, they become the essential rails that every other AI agent runs on. That’s a powerful position to be in.
blockchain-actually-makes-sense”>Where blockchain actually makes sense
Now, the blockchain part is just as strategic, but for a different layer. All this AI agent activity still needs to settle somewhere. Ant’s deep work with HSBC, Citi, JPMorgan, and others on tokenized deposits—and its role in flagship projects like Singapore’s Project Guardian—is about modernizing the backend. It’s less about crypto speculation and more about making cross-border liquidity and settlement faster, cheaper, and programmable. Combine efficient AI-driven forecasting (like Falcon) with blockchain-based settlement, and you start to see a full-stack vision. The front-end is intelligent agents, and the back-end is streamlined, tokenized value movement.
You can’t have scale without trust
And you can’t do any of this if people don’t trust it. That’s why Ant is hammering the security and compliance angle so hard. A 99.8% deepfake detection rate? A 90% reduction in account takeovers? These aren’t just nice stats. They’re the absolute prerequisite for letting AI agents loose with your money. The heavy investment in privacy computing—letting partners share insights without sharing raw data—is also key for regulatory buy-in across different markets. Basically, they’re building the trust layer simultaneously with the innovation layer. One without the other is useless.
So, what’s the real impact?
This isn’t just tech for tech’s sake. The immediate winners look like the merchants and fintechs in Ant’s core emerging markets in Asia. Tools like the AI SME app EPOS360 or the GenAI Cockpit for banks lower the barrier to sophisticated automation. But the long-term play is about shaping the infrastructure. If Ant’s protocols and models become the norm, traditional payment processors who are slower to adapt could find themselves disintermediated. The company is betting that the future of payments is a blend of autonomous AI action on the front end and seamless, blockchain-informed settlement on the back end. It’s a compelling, full-spectrum vision. Whether they can execute it globally, against plenty of well-funded competitors, is the real question for 2025 and beyond.
