Alibaba launches artificial intelligence search for small businesses, says purchase intention jumps | Real Time Headlines

BEIJING—Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba An artificial intelligence-powered search engine for small businesses in Europe and the Americas to find supplies was launched on Tuesday.

This is an attempt to use technology like ChatGPT to increase sales. Zhang Kuo, president of Alibaba International Station and vice president of Alibaba International, said preliminary tests show that companies using the new tool have a 40% increase in purchase intention compared with traditional search engines.

The product is called Accio, after the spell used to summon objects in the Harry Potter fantasy series. According to the company, the initial version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

With just a few text or image prompts, businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products, including analyzing their popularity among consumers and projected profits, according to a demo viewed by CNBC.

Examples presented include helping a sports entrepreneur build a line of pickleball products. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of sourcing options for businesses to discuss directly with each supplier.

The technology uses Alibaba’s generative artificial intelligence Tongyi Qianwen Zhang said he declined to confirm whether the product incorporates artificial intelligence from other companies.

The LL.M. is an artificial intelligence model trained on a large amount of data. The model supports generative AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can generate human-like responses to user prompts. To be sure, some businesses are still in the experimental stages of artificial intelligence, and many have yet to find ways to monetize the technology.

Accio uses data from 50 million companies on Alibaba’s international platform as well as public industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool contains 1 billion product listings and documents from Alibaba’s website, covering industries in more than 100 markets.

European and North American companies are the largest group of buyers, the company said.

Alibaba’s international unit released an updated version of its artificial intelligence translation tool in October to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claims tech’s translation capabilities beat Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.

International business has grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba’s main revenue driver remains its domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that “the Taobao app has the greatest potential to become the AI empowers one-stop smart portal for life consumption”.

More than half of the more than 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com used the Artificial intelligence-enabled generation toolsaccording to a Bain & Company survey.

These capabilities include artificial intelligence for customer service and content generation. The survey found that 56% of respondents said artificial intelligence tools have a “highly positive impact” on improving productivity.

Alibaba is scheduled to report quarterly results on Friday.

—CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.