Among the clients of the Chinese marketplace Alibaba, about 200,000 sellers are currently using AI-powered tools every week, according to the management. By the end of this year, the coverage should reach 100%.
Image source: Unsplash, Zhang Hui
Alibaba President Zhang Kuo, quoted by the South China Morning Post, said the company is confident that customers will be able to fully adopt the AI tools it introduced early last year by the end of the year. “Ultimately, when they feel that these tools are easier to operate and [AI agents] offer better performance, it’s up to AI to take care of that,” the Chinese e-commerce giant’s chief executive said.
Alibaba plans to invest $52 billion over the next three years to develop its own artificial intelligence infrastructure, a record amount for a private company in China to finance computer technology projects. Ultimately, Alibaba hopes to develop artificial intelligence (AGI) that can match human cognitive abilities by 80%.
According to Zhang, large language models are the third major “tectonic shift” in computing. The first was the shift from desktop to mobile, and the second was the shift to online payments. As large language models are adopted, Alibaba’s president notes, shoppers are able to more precisely define their criteria when searching for a product, and search results are more accurate.
Alibaba launched its AI-powered search engine Accio last November, and by the end of February, it was used by about 1 million of its customers. It helped streamline the giant supplier catalogs and increased the number of purchase requests from search results by 30%.
Alibaba is not limited to the Qwen language model, since its customers live in different countries and speak different languages. DeepSeek and Meta✴ Platforms are used in parallel. In Europe, the ability to translate correspondence between buyers and sellers on the fly has significantly increased the turnover of the Alibaba platform. The threat of a “trade war” between the US and China does not frighten the company’s management. According to Alibaba, since the beginning of this year, the number of suppliers on the platform both in China and abroad has grown by double-digit percentages. This trend will certainly continue, Zhang Ko believes.