AI agents can help merchants move faster. The harder question is whether they can turn an insight into an action and connect that action to a measurable business outcome.
Throughout September, Shoplazza took part in a range of industry events, including those hosted by Stripe, PayPal, Google Cloud, Ant International, J.P. Morgan and Forbes China. The discussions spanned payments, AI agents, financial operations and emerging technologies. Together, they pointed to a shared challenge: businesses need technology that works across real commercial processes, from finding an opportunity to serving a customer and completing a transaction.
Making smooth payments part of the conversion journey
At the Stripe Tour in Shanghai, China, Shoplazza joined the event as a partner and was also featured on the event's case study wall alongside companies including GitHub, Canva and Kimi.
In the speaking session, Shoplazza founder and CEO Jeff Li discussed why payment performance matters to merchants expanding internationally. Attracting traffic is only part of the job. Merchants also need customers to complete checkout with confidence and without unnecessary friction.
That is why Shoplazza has invested in payment capabilities within its commerce platform. By combining its view of the merchant journey with Stripe's payment infrastructure, the two companies are working to improve the checkout experience and help merchants manage the movement of funds more efficiently.
Giving AI agents real work to do
At Google Cloud Agentic Commerce Day, Jeff presented Shoplazza's approach to a multi-agent engine. His central point was simple: access to AI is becoming widespread, but putting AI to work in a real commercial process remains harder to achieve.
Shoplazza's AI agent, Athena, is designed to take a business goal, break it into tasks and coordinate specialized agents across store building, visual content creation, marketing, customer retention and etc. Its recent updates extend that work across stores and markets and into real internet environments. For example, Athena can use a Chrome extension to support product research and carry out certain store operations.
The aim is a continuous cycle: diagnose an issue, recommend an action, execute it with appropriate oversight, and measure what changed. Shoplazza also discussed how enterprise agent platforms such as Gemini Enterprise could support the deployment and governance of multiple agents as these workflows grow more complex.
Turning operating experience into reusable capabilities
At Ant International Voyage 2026, Shoplazza co-founder and COO Alyson Zhang joined a discussion with financial institutions and business leaders about global growth in the AI era.
A recurring issue for merchants is the gap between identifying an opportunity and acting on it. Athena Skills addresses that gap by turning Shoplazza's experience serving more than 650,000 merchants into capabilities that AI agents can call within a workflow. Current examples include checkout conversion diagnostics, customer segmentation and product affinity analysis.
A merchant might identify where shoppers drop out of checkout, examine which customer groups are affected, and use those findings to decide what to improve. Shoplazza CLI extends this approach by making platform capabilities available for agents and developers to call.
Bringing commerce and financial risk into the same conversation
Alyson also attended the J.P. Morgan APAC CFO & Treasurers Forum 2026, where discussions with the J.P. Morgan team covered global risk management and compliance for cross-border businesses.
As agents take on more operational tasks, questions of authorization, controls and accountability become more relevant. Merchants need to know what an agent can do, when a person must approve an action, and how decisions can be reviewed afterward. These questions matter across store operations, and especially where transactions and money movement are involved.
Connecting innovation with commercial reality
Shoplazza CRO Adam Mawdesley attended the 2026 Forbes China Silicon Valley Innovation Forum, joining founders, investors and business leaders for discussions on AI, emerging technologies and international expansion.
A recurring theme was the path from technical innovation to commercial value. For companies entering new markets, that means building the capabilities to reach customers, accept payments and manage risk. The forum gave Shoplazza an opportunity to exchange perspectives with others working across the China–U.S. business ecosystem.
What comes next
The next stage of agentic commerce will be judged by what businesses can actually get done. An agent should be able to connect a goal to the relevant data, coordinate the right tools, carry out authorized actions and show the result.
That is the direction behind Shoplazza's work across Athena, Athena Skills, Shoplazza CLI and its global partner ecosystem: making AI useful in the day-to-day work of building and growing an international business.
