Alibaba International promotes its e-commerce platform for small businesses at the Canton Fair in Guangdong, China, on October 16, 2024.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING – Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.com on Tuesday unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered search engine that will help small businesses in Europe and America purchase supplies.
It is an attempt to use ChatGPT-like technology to increase sales. Initial tests showed that businesses' purchasing intent increased by 40% when using the new tool compared to traditional search engines, said Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International.
The product is called Accio, after the spell used to summon objects in the Harry Potter fantasy series. The first version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, according to the company.
With a few text or image prompts, businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products – including analyzing their popularity with consumers and expected profits, according to demos viewed by CNBC.
Examples shown included helping a sports entrepreneur build a line of pickleball products. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of purchasing options that the company can discuss directly with each supplier.
The technology uses generative AI from Alibaba's major language model Tongyi Qianwen, Zhang said, but declined to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.
An LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of data. One model supports generative AI applications, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts. It's fair to say that several companies are still in the experimentation phase with AI and many have not yet found a way to monetize the technology.
Accio uses data from 50 million companies on Alibaba International's platform and publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool contains 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries in more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company's business-to-business platform that sells to companies outside China.
Companies based in Europe and North America make up the largest group of buyers, the company said.
Alibaba's international arm announced in October an updated version of an AI translation tool that will help sellers reach customers in other countries. The company claimed that the technology's translation capabilities were better than those of Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.
Its international operations have grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba's main source of revenue remains its 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 living and consumption, powered by AI.”
During the weeklong Singles Day shopping festival that wrapped up Monday, more than half of the 500-plus sellers selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and JD.com used a generative AI-based tool, according to a Bain & Company.
These features include AI for customer service and content generation. The survey found that 56% of respondents said AI tools had a “major positive impact” on improving productivity.
Alibaba will announce its quarterly results on Friday.
—CNBC'sArjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
