Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group has unveiled its latest innovation, a suite of new AI agents aimed at transforming the efficiency of global merchants. The new AI-powered tools, which are integrated into the company’s B2B e-commerce platforms, are designed to automate complex, time-consuming tasks and significantly reduce the operational burdens on businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and solo entrepreneurs.
This launch marks a major stride toward what the company is calling “agentic commerce,” a paradigm where AI agents handle business-critical workflows autonomously. The flagship product, Accio Agent, is an evolution of Alibaba International’s B2B search engine, Accio. It’s trained on a massive dataset of over 1 billion product listings and 50 million supplier profiles, enabling it to act as a virtual team of experts, from sourcing agents to market researchers.
Merchants can simply input a product concept, and Accio Agent takes over. It generates a detailed development plan, conducts real-time supplier vetting, and handles bulk requests for quotes (RFQs). This process, which can typically take weeks of manual work, is compressed into minutes, automating up to 70% of the traditional procurement workflow.
Beyond sourcing, Alibaba International has also introduced Marco, an AI solution designed to assist with a wide range of e-commerce operations. Marco can handle over 60 specific tasks across marketing, marketplace compliance, and customer service. Its capabilities include creative image generation from a single source image, creating product listings from images, and generating multilingual marketing content. It’s fluent in more than 40 languages, which is a huge boost for merchants operating in a global market. The AI has shown remarkable results, with daily API calls by merchants exceeding 1 billion and a 30% increase in user satisfaction for translation in major European languages.
Another agent, the HS Code Agent, automates customs classification with increased accuracy, while the Merchant Recruitment Agent helps identify and pre-qualify potential sellers. These tools are democratizing sophisticated automation, making it accessible to smaller businesses that lack the resources of larger corporations. By leveraging these AI-powered assistants, merchants can now focus on strategy and scaling their businesses, rather than getting bogged down by administrative and logistical hurdles. This move solidifies Alibaba International’s commitment to empowering businesses with cutting-edge technology to thrive in the digital age.
