Alibaba.com will be integrating agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) to its B2B eCommerce platform this December. The new AI Mode capability will assist businesses in finding, assessing, and engaging suppliers, the company said in a Friday (Nov. 14) press release.
For instance, AI Mode will be able to give companies specific recommendations within seconds by understanding natural language queries, going over technical specifications and comparing offers from suppliers based on pricing, logistics capabilities, certifications and production capacity, the release says.
Alibaba.com is also developing AI Mode to create a completely automated, end-to-end trading environment by integrating with the platform’s current services, including securitised payment, Trade Assurance and after-sales support, it added.
“AI is now a fundamental tool for Alibaba.com — it is becoming the operating system of our platform,” Alibaba.com President Kuo Zhang said in the release.“This combination of heavy-hitting brands is perfect for this market at this time.
AI Mode is supported by Alibaba.com’s AI-driven B2B search platform-funded engine Accio, introduced in 2024,” according to a release. Accio can interpret product sketches, engineering blueprints, documents, certificates and track records from factories and other unstructured data inputs, according to the release.
“This capability unlocks what Alibaba.com refers to as the “hidden product shelf”: the huge raft of specialist, custom or regionally-focused suppliers – frequently high-potential SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises]—whose expertise is obscured behind traditional keyword-based discovery models,” according to the release.
When Alibaba.com, debuted in November 2024, the product was described as an artificial intelligence-based search engine for small businesses in Europe and the Americas to find supplies.
They are powered by the company’s large language model, Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen), and the data is drawn from 50 million businesses on Alibaba International’s platform and other publicly available information.
In July, Mid Breaker reported Alibaba fine-tunes its focus on AI and e-commerce by divesting non-core business issues and zeroing in on the customer experience, as well as having AI everywhere.
The Ali-baba Group, for example, said in August that revenue for the quarter ended June 30 had grown by 2 percent from a year earlier, or by 10 percent if one ignored turnover from two businesses it has shed over the past year.
The company said it was “entering a new chapter of entrepreneurship” by investing in two strategic pillars, consumption and AI + Cloud.
