Alibaba Launches AI-Powered Search Engine for International Merchants
By Kelsey Cheng
(Lisbon, Portugal) — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. launched an artificial intelligence-powered search engine for international merchants on Tuesday, as the Chinese tech giant looks to a new revenue stream for its cross-border e-commerce business.
Accio, a business-to-business search engine, helps small and midsize merchants locate and connect with global suppliers by allowing natural language and multi-modal searches such as spreadsheets and photos, said Zhang Kuo, president of Alibaba.com, the company’s international wholesale marketplace, at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Every product will also have a Wikipedia-like info page on Accio, which can provide sourcing information, and estimates based on real-time data for delivery dates and time.
The AI assistant aims to make merchants’ sourcing processes more efficient, Zhang said. It can also help them with logistics, shipping and provide customer and after-sales support.
“Global trade is the ideal setting for AI application,” Zhang said at the launch, citing a U.N. estimate of global trade hitting more than $30 trillion this year. Alibaba.com’s gross merchandise value — the total value of goods sold by merchants using its platforms — now exceeds $50 billion each year, he said.
“Accio lowers the threshold for people who wish to enter the e-commerce market,” Zhang told Caixin. The tool, which took about a year from concept to launch, is primarily based on Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba’s proprietary large language model. However, the tool also uses other models for “different use cases.”
The tool is free during the current trial period, but eventually it will be subscription-based for merchants, Zhang told Caixin, without revealing a date for when it will become a paid product.
As of March-end this year, Alibaba.com had more than 230,000 paying members, according to the company’s annual report.
Accio’s launch comes as the e-commerce giant looks to grow its merchant user base and find new international revenue streams, following a sweeping reorganization of the company that aimed to revitalize growth in an increasingly competitive market. The Hangzhou-based firm had been grappling with sluggish consumption and rising competition from PDD Holdings Inc. and ByteDance Ltd.’s Douyin.
Revenue at Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, which comprises Alibaba.com and retail e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress and Lazada, grew 32% year-on-year to 29.3 billion yuan ($4 billion) in the June quarter, driven by strong growth of cross-border businesses, it said. Alibaba is scheduled to release its September quarter results on Friday.
“We are dedicated to making it easy for SMEs to participate in global trade, leveraging technology and making it easy to do business anywhere,” Zhang said in his speech.
Web Summit, a major tech and investor heavy conference, has a record number of more than 71,000 attendees from 153 countries attending this year.
Contact reporter Kelsey Cheng (kelseycheng@caixin.com) and editor Jonathan Breen (jonathanbreen@caixin.com)
caixinglobal.com is the English-language online news portal of Chinese financial and business news media group Caixin. Global Neighbours is authorized to reprint this article.
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