Alibaba.com: How AI is reshaping B2B sales and entrepreneurship
For Alibaba.com, the true transformative power of AI won’t be for customers; it will be for business-to-business sales.
Multimodal search, such as AI search using multiple data points, is driving a “paradigm shift” in global e-commerce, says Alibaba.com president Kuo Zhang at CoCreate Europe.
“We’re completely redesigning what search is… for this year alone, our multimodal search increased 100 per cent,” he added.
It’s been so successful that Alibaba.com, an e-commerce platform that connects manufacturers, suppliers, and wholesalers with buyers, is rolling out a ‘AI mode’ – a new feature which integrates agentic AI capabilities directly into the user journey.
“AI is no longer a supplementary tool at Alibaba.com… it’s evolving into the operating system of our platform,” Zhang said.
AI’s potential for SMEs
While AI’s potential efficiency benefits for businesses and consumers have been well documented, Alibaba.com is betting that it offers significant value to small businesses that don’t have as much funding or time as big players.
“We are helping the small guys, many of them are solo entrepreneurs that do not have expertise, time, resources, so we are helping them to kind of achieve their dreams,” Zhang said.
“[AI search] helps you to drive the business much faster… you can make a decision very fast,” he adds.
Defining its policy as a ‘defining strategic bet on Agentic AI,’ it’s another example of Alibaba.com significantly changing its strategy to keep pace with the tech of the moment.
The company started as a business-to-business yellow page website, morphing into a behemoth serving more than three million orders a year.
“Every three or four years, we see kind of a great technology evolving, and we want to leverage as much as possible for the amount of supply batch and serve analysis about the supply chain, the payment, the logistics,” Zhang says.
“When the right technology comes, we just apply that technology to solve the real problems,” he says.
A ‘challenging economic time’
One of the benefits of AI for SMEs is that it allows technology to be “at your fingertips” despite a tough economic climate, entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den star Sara Davies says.
“You can use AI tools to support you with… suppliers, customer resource research… it’s going to revolutionise every area of business that we do,” Davies, whose first product, The Enveloper, was launched in 2005, says.
“It’s so much more achievable for people to bring their product to market, but then also to be able to bring it to the consumer to market.”
But Davies, who has been in the industry for over twenty years, six of which have been spent judging young entrepreneurs on Dragon’s Den, has a word of warning for young businesses using AI for operations.
“Never let it allow you to get lazy. I see so many people use AI in lieu of doing the work themselves… customers can smell that inauthenticity a mile off.”