Alibaba launches its first AI search engine in the B2B field overseas

Alibaba's progress in AI overseas seems to be faster than its domestic e-commerce.

We learned that on November 12, Alibaba launched the conversational AI search engine Accio overseas, open to global merchants. This is the world's first AI search engine in the B2B sector.

The main interface of Accio is a dialogue box, and its product form is similar to the AI search engine Perplexity, positioned as a personal procurement agent. When users input their needs, it filters information such as suppliers, customization range, prices, terminal retail sales volume, and customer reviews to output suitable merchants and products. According to our understanding, Accio aims to integrate information from over 30 million supply chain enterprises involved in cross-border trade. In comparison, the number of merchants listed on Alibaba International Station is 250,000.

Previously, some capabilities of Accio had been gradually launched in the "Find Factories" module of Alibaba International Station. An Alibaba overseas representative stated that during the trial run, the conversion rate for users searching for procurement increased by 20% - 30%.

As of the launch day, the number of products covered by Accio has expanded to the hundreds of millions. Currently, the PC and WAP versions (web versions for computers and mobile phones) have been launched, covering five languages: English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, while the mobile version is still under development.

The Accio project is led by Zhang Kuo, president of Alibaba International Station. Currently, the AI team of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group (hereinafter referred to as "Alibaba Overseas") has exceeded 400 people, directly supervised by Jiang Fan, co-chairman and CEO of Alibaba Overseas. The team is divided into two directions: 2B and 2C, respectively led by Zhang Kuo and Zhang Kaifu, head of AI Business at Alibaba Overseas.

Alibaba Overseas Officially Enters the AI Search Field

After the "1+6+N" transformation in March 2023, Alibaba Overseas was established as an independent company. At the first all-hands meeting in April, Jiang Fan stated that the abbreviation for Alibaba Overseas is AIDC (Alibaba International Digital Commerce), which represents both Alibaba's international business and its birth in the AI era, indicating the future direction of the company. Jiang Fan has been involved multiple times in the development of Accio from initial concept, project establishment, to research and development and launch.

At a monthly business meeting of Alibaba International Station in early April this year, the core team planned the prototype of this product, which was not yet called Accio at that time, but referred to as the "Buyer AI Agent" project of Alibaba International Station, aimed at utilizing AI's advantages in natural language understanding and generation to become an AI assistant for overseas buyers on Alibaba International Station, helping to simplify tedious procurement steps However, Jiang Fan believes that one should "jump out of Alibaba International Station" and not be confined to the existing framework, treating it merely as a chatbot. He urged the project team to "create an AI-native product," hoping they would break through the current product framework and truly understand the meaning of AI-native, even detailing the history from internet-native products to mobile-native products.

After this meeting, the positioning of the "Buyer AI Agent" project transformed into a conversational AI search engine, separating from Alibaba International Station and becoming a standalone new product, open to all merchants globally. This includes not only the global supply from Alibaba International Station but also adds supplies from various independent sites, third-party e-commerce websites, and offline factories worldwide.

The product is named Accio, which means "to fly here" in Latin and is also the incantation for the "Summoning Charm" in "Harry Potter." When wizards say "Accio," they can summon objects to their hands; by saying "Accio" followed by the name of the object, they can bring distant items closer.

This name vividly reflects the product's user experience: by typing "I want to build a ski resort in Dubai" in the chat box, Accio will display a complete entrepreneurial process from market research, land acquisition, architectural design to opening events, engaging in step-by-step dialogue with the user. If you ask what to buy, items like snow machines, climate control systems, skiing equipment, safety nets, etc., will continuously "fly in" by category.

Product images, names, unit prices, minimum order quantities, and supplier information will be directly displayed in the results. By clicking the link, further details such as specific product parameters, main selling points, warranty periods, and supplier reputation will be presented, with similar products listed at the bottom. Users can also utilize the AI filtering function to select products that meet their requirements based on specific parameters, installation methods, raw materials, shipping locations, and other conditions.

The best-selling skirt in Shein USA (left) and a price comparison of similar styles on Temu USA (middle) and Accio (right). (Swipe left and right to view)

We learned that Accio adopts a "Multi-Agent" architecture. Each time a user interacts, Accio performs 5-10 backend task reallocations, introducing more specialized "Agents" with detailed knowledge.

Each industry AI agent behind Accio has re-learned and summarized product information from Alibaba International Station, publicly available industry information, and other data. Accio also incorporates multiple data sources and timeline dimensions, among other cross-validation mechanisms, to ensure the accuracy of product information. These product and transaction data help Accio reduce large model hallucinations— even the most advanced AI models cannot completely avoid nonsensical outputs In our practical experience, Accio still has some shortcomings. For example, Accio's brand and restrictions on resale protection are not comprehensive enough; it will refuse our requests to replicate or purchase iPhones, Air Jordan basketball shoes, and DJI drones. However, when the products are changed to Moutai liquor, Jellycat toys, or Arc'teryx jackets, it will carefully analyze the production processes and raw materials of these products and provide corresponding procurement suggestions and links.

At the WebSummit technology summit held in Portugal, Zhang Kuo announced the launch of Accio while stating, "The version that has gone live only includes 10% of our imagination for B2B business models in the AI era, and it will require multiple iterations in the future."

Zhang Kuo believes that as the barriers to procurement are lowered, half of global trade will penetrate through intelligence in the future. In fact, there is a wealth of information lying dormant in the B2B trade sector that urgently needs further digitization and AI integration, "the imaginative space for this market is enormous."

According to market research firm eMarketer, global B2B digital advertising spending is expected to reach $38.7 billion in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 13%. It is projected that by 2026, the global B2B digital advertising market size will triple compared to the pre-pandemic level of 2019 ($16.4 billion).

Search engines are one of the core entry points for B2B trade. In the past, this entry point was concentrated in traditional search engines like Google, but AI is breaking this pattern—NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang uses Perplexity daily, and OpenAI's SearchGPT, developed based on GPT-4, is attempting to carve out a share of Google's monopoly in the search field from different niche areas. Alibaba International's Accio has also become one of them.

As Alibaba's oldest business, the international station is increasingly leveraging AI to transform its operations. Zhang Kuo stated that in the future, there will be stratification of global supply, where merchants on Alibaba International will have complete fulfillment capabilities backed by the platform, ranking highest in the supply chain priority.

Alibaba's Multidimensional AI Layout Overseas

In the past year, among Alibaba Group's various businesses, Alibaba Overseas has been the most active sector in AI, aside from Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Overseas' AI layout revolves entirely around cross-border business—cross-border e-commerce naturally has language barriers across different global markets, complex consumer operations, and compliance requirements, which determines that the scenarios for AI usage are rich and easily scalable.

In addition to Accio, Alibaba Overseas has launched two AI products in the B2B field over the past year—an AI business assistant that helps sellers with intelligent product listing, reception, and analysis, and a foreign trade SaaS tool, OKKI AI, that assists merchants in writing emails to customers.

The B2C sector is mainly overseen by Zhang Kaifu. Over the past year, Alibaba Overseas has released over 40 AI tools for various e-commerce scenarios, including product images and text, marketing, search, advertising, customer service, refunds, as well as AI products in vertical fields such as design and painting Currently, Alibaba's e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress, Taobao Tmall Overseas, Lazada, and Trendyol are already applying AI to provide customer service, marketing, and advertising services for cross-border and local overseas merchants. As of November, the average daily usage has reached 260 million times, achieving a scale-level application.

On October 16, Alibaba Overseas also launched the translation large model Marco, supporting 15 mainstream languages including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French. Its performance on the BLEU automatic evaluation metric in the open-source evaluation dataset Flores surpassed Google Translate, DeepL, and GPT-4, marking a milestone.

Several Alibaba Overseas personnel believe that "for Alibaba, the most pragmatic approach is to start doing AI from its own business." This aligns with the practices of American companies like Google and Amazon.

Currently, Alibaba Overseas is facing a competitive landscape where retail businesses represented by AliExpress and Lazada are still competing with Temu and Shopee. Although Alibaba Overseas is growing the fastest among the group's various sectors, it is also the most severely loss-making business for Alibaba. According to Alibaba's financial report, in the second quarter of this year, Alibaba Overseas incurred an operating loss of approximately 3.7 billion yuan, nearly ten times that of the second most loss-making local lifestyle business.

In this context, the rapidly changing AI technology is far from mature, and Alibaba Overseas must ensure it keeps up with every key technological change in AI while also avoiding excessive investment that could drag down the investment in its main business battlefield.

Finding a dynamic balance between AI investment and business development is a long-term challenge that Alibaba Overseas and Jiang Fan will face.

Author of this article: LatePost Team, Source: 晚点 LatePost, Original Title: "LatePost Exclusive | Alibaba Overseas Launches First AI Search Engine in the B2B Field"