Alibaba International promotes its e-commerce platform for small businesses at the Canton Fair in Guangdong, China on October 16, 2024.
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BEIJING – Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled an artificial intelligence-based search engine for small businesses in Europe and America to source supplies.
It is an attempt to use ChatGPT-like technology to increase sales. According to Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International, initial tests have shown that purchase intent for companies using the new tool increased by 40% compared to traditional search engines.
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, companies can use Accio to find wholesale products — including analysis of their popularity with consumers and projected profit, according to demos seen by CNBC.
Examples shown included helping a sports entrepreneur build a pickleball product line. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of sourcing 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, declining to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.
An LLM is an artificial intelligence model that is trained on large amounts of data. One model supports generative AI applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user input. Of course, some companies are still in the experimentation phase with AI and many companies have yet to find a way to monetize the technology.
Accio uses data from 50 million companies on Alibaba International's platform as well as publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool includes 1 billion product listings and documents from Alibaba.com, the company's business-to-business platform that covers industries in more than 100 markets, and sells to companies outside China.
Companies based in Europe and North America are the largest group of buyers, the company said.
Alibaba's international arm announced an updated version of an AI translation tool in October to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claimed the technology's translation capabilities were superior to those of Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.
International business has grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba's main revenue drivers remain its domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that “the Taobao app has the greatest potential to become a one-stop intelligent portal for life and consumption enabled by AI.”
During the week-long Singles Day shopping festival that ended Monday, more than half of the over 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com used a generative AI-powered tool, according to reports a survey by Bain & Company.
These features include AI for customer service and content generation. The survey found that 56% of respondents said AI tools had a “very positive impact” on improving productivity.
Alibaba is expected to report quarterly results on Friday.
—CNBC's Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.