Alibaba International promotes its e-commerce platform for small and medium-sized businesses at the Canton Fair in Guangdong, China on October 16, 2024.
Video Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING — China’s e-commerce giant alibaba on Tuesday unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered search engine to help small and medium-sized businesses in Europe and the Americas source supplies.
This is an attempt to leverage technology like ChatGPT to increase sales. Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International, said initial testing showed a 40% increase in purchase intent for businesses using the new tool compared to traditional search engines. That’s what it means.
The product is called Accio, after the spell used to summon objects in the Harry Potter fantasy series. The initial version will be web-based and support English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, the company said.
Businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products by simply entering a few text and image prompts, according to a demo seen by CNBC. This includes analyzing popularity among consumers and expected profits.
Examples shown included helping sports entrepreneurs build a line of pickleball products; At the end of the search, the tool lists numerous sourcing options for companies to discuss directly with each supplier.
Zhang said the technology uses Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large-scale language model generation AI, but declined to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.
LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of data. The model supports generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts. To be sure, some companies are still experimenting with AI, and many have yet to figure out how to monetize this technology.
Accio uses data from 50 million companies on Alibaba International’s platform, as well as publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool incorporates 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries in more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company’s B2B platform that sells to businesses outside of China.
The company says companies based in Europe and North America are the largest group of buyers.
In October, Alibaba’s international division announced the latest version of its AI translation tool to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claimed that the technology’s translation capabilities exceed those of Google, DeepL, and ChatGPT.
Although its international business has grown rapidly in recent years, Alibaba’s main sources of revenue remain domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that “Taobao app has the greatest potential to become a one-stop smart portal for life and consumption enabled by AI.”
More than half of the more than 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and Jingdong Mall used AI-powered generation tools during the multi-week Singles’ Day shopping festival that ended on Monday. , according to a Bain & Company study. company.
These capabilities include AI for customer service and content generation. According to the survey, 56% of respondents said AI tools have a “highly positive impact” on improving productivity.
Alibaba is scheduled to release quarterly results on Friday.
—CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
