Intent-Based Payment in the Zero-Click Economy: Impacts, Risks and Responsible Innovation

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the booming Zero-Click Economy, AI-driven intent-based payment has emerged as a vital innovation in digital finance, bringing unprecedented transaction convenience while triggering potential risks and ethical problems. Taking Alibaba’s Qianwen as a case study, this paper explores the operating mechanism of intent-based payment and examines its comprehensive effects from five dimensions: consumer behavior, enterprise operation, social governance, cultural psychology and technical ethics. The study reveals that intent-based payment falls into the "Frictionless Trap" while boosting efficiency, which erodes consumer sovereignty, forms enterprise data hegemony, causes regulatory gaps, and gives rise to ethical predation via affective computing and algorithmic discrimination. To address these issues, this paper proposes a systematic responsible innovation framework covering technical design, policy supervision, corporate responsibility and social participation. This research enriches the theoretical research on digital payment ethics and provides practical references for the standardized and sustainable development of intentbased payment as well as the protection of public digital sovereignty.