On September 10, the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and Ant Digital Technologies co-hosted the Insight Forum “The Agentic Leap: Reshaping Enterprise AGI” at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai. The forum brought together leading experts, scholars, and industry leaders to examine, through forward-looking perspectives and practical insights, how the agent era is reshaping industrial transformation.
Keynote Speech and Dialogue Session
In his keynote speech titled “AI Economy: Intelligent Production at Scale, from Value Creation to Value Capture,” Wensheng Peng, Professor of Practice at SAIF and Chief Economist of SAIF Think Tank, outlined the macro landscape of the AI economy. He analyzed how, in the era of large AI models, value creation exceeds value capture and spills over downstream. Comparing China and the United States in AI capital expenditure, talent, application scenarios, and capital market activity, he noted that the U.S. faces pressure on back-end investment returns, while China must overcome front-end computing power bottlenecks. He argued that China should respond to the future challenges of the AI economy through coordinated efforts across aggregate demand management, industrial policy, and innovation finance.
In the Dialogue Session, Zhuoqun Bian, President of Blockchain Business at Ant Digital Technologies, and Bin Yu, President of AI Business at Ant Digital Technologies — both also Vice Presidents of Ant Group — discussed “The Dawn of the Agent Economy,” arguing that AI and blockchain are two sides of the same coin driving the agent economy.
Standard Launch and Report Release
A launch ceremony was held for the national standard project on Know Your Agent (KYA), attended by representatives including Lin Sun, Deputy Director of the Blockchain Research Office at the China Electronics Standardization Institute; Xiaodong Shao, Vice President of Ant Digital Technologies and Chairman of the IIFAA; and Shijun Cheng, Executive Dean of SAIF. The national standardization guiding technical document, “Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology — Requirements for KYA,” establishes for the first time a blockchain-based agent identity management model. It covers full-chain technical requirements, from overall architecture to identity identifiers, establishment, verification, cross-chain interoperability, and interface specifications, and is expected to accelerate the agent economy’s move from concept to scaled commercial deployment.
The SAIF Think Tank and the Ant Group Research Institute jointly released “Top 10 Trends in Enterprise Agent Commercial Evolution in 2026.” Using a four-tier framework, the report traces the evolution of enterprise agents from technology exploration to business closed-loop and provides a panoramic reference framework for industry decision-making and investment planning. Yujun Wu, head of the research team, Affiliate Professor at SAIF, and Research Fellow at the China Academy of Financial Research (CAFR Think Tank), noted that 2026 marks the inflection point when agents shift from “capability competition” to “business closed-loop competition.” He added that the next phase of digital competition will center on building human-machine collaborative workforce systems capable of autonomous execution and continuous evolution, and he urged decision-makers and investors to seize the 2026 commercialization opportunity by shifting from an arms race in computing power to workflow embedding and digital asset accumulation.
Industry Cases and Roundtables
In the industry cases session, Lewis Sun, Managing Director and Global Head of Digital Currency at HSBC, presented “From the Digital Economy to the Agent Economy: Building Payment and Value Networks in the A2A Era,” outlining how global payment systems may be restructured in an era of autonomous agent transactions. Xiaohui Deng, Head of the Technology Application Section of the Information Management Department at Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, spoke on “Making AI Think Like an Expert: Practices of Trustworthy Agents in Core Hospital Scenarios,” showing how trustworthy agents can evolve from a “black box” into a reliable “expert assistant.”
The forum featured two roundtables. The first roundtable, titled “After the Hype: Seeking ‘Absolute Alpha’ in Industrial Agents,” was moderated by Haiying Ni, Executive Director of the SAIF MBA Program and Director of the Specialized Master’s Center. Panelists included Wei Shang, Chief Financial Officer of Green Tea Group; Jingyue Shi, Co-President of Fubo Group; and other guests from consumer, copyright, energy, finance, and technology sectors. The panelists unanimously agreed that the value of industrial agents derives from the deep accumulation of proprietary data and scenario experience, with AI acting as an amplifier rather than a creator. True “alpha” depends not only on human judgment but also on whether organizations can continuously embed that judgment into AI and evolve with it.
The second roundtable, titled “Breaking Through and Restructuring: Exploring the Value Anchor of Financial Agents,” was moderated by Bingbing Dong, Term Associate Professor at SAIF. It brought together Weili Fang, Deputy General Manager of Huatai-PB Investment; Hua Wan, Deputy General Manager and Architect of Retail Banking at Shanghai Pudong Development Bank; and other guests to discuss frontline applications of financial agents in banking, securities, insurance, funds, and consumer finance. They explored how financial agents can enter core processes, build sustainable value anchors, and remain controllable, trustworthy, and auditable. Panelists added that beyond efficiency gains, such agents strengthen risk control and compliance, with a human-machine collaborative review baseline as the key to keeping them controllable, trustworthy, and auditable.
About SAIF
Founded in 2009 by the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, SAIF is an international finance institution established to serve the national strategy of building Shanghai into an international financial center. It has since actively engaged in the integration of finance and technology and, guided by the “Five Major Articles” of finance and Shanghai’s “Five Centers” initiative, focuses on innovation finance, digital finance, and sustainable finance while leveraging SJTU’s comprehensive strengths to advance curriculum innovation and industry-academia-research collaboration. Through high-level academic exchange and interactive platforms, SAIF also advances academic innovation, supports social development, and contributes to building a financial powerhouse, developing Shanghai as an international financial center, and supporting SJTU’s efforts to become a world-class university.
About Ant Digital Technologies
Ant Digital Technologies is a technology commercialization unit under Ant Group that has operated independently since April 2024. To date, it has partnered with more than 300 organizations and serves over 30,000 enterprise clients worldwide. From its Hong Kong hub, it brings innovative practices to markets across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, with the aim of becoming a global leader in enterprise-grade AGI and on-chain new-economy technology services that help enterprises worldwide accelerate their transition to the AGI era.
