Source: Featured Blogs - Forrester
Ant International is positioning itself as the plumbing layer for AI-driven commerce rather than competing directly on agent platforms. The strategy mirrors how Stripe and Square moved upmarket by enabling third-party developers. By focusing on protocol-level infrastructure at scale—handling real-time payment, settlement, and merchant experience problems that generic AI agents can't solve—Ant is betting that near-term money lies in enterprise infrastructure, not in building the agents themselves. This reflects a hardening view in fintech that whoever owns the merchant connection layer in an AI-first commerce world will capture more value than whoever builds the customer-facing agent.