Alibaba debuts world’s 1st AI agent for global trade

An official promotional image for Alibaba International's Accio Agent / Courtesy of Alibaba.com

Alibaba International has launched the world’s first trade-focused artificial intelligence (AI) agent, Accio Agent, that can help small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) develop products and find distributors in just a few minutes, the multinational e-commerce facilitator said Monday.

The AI platform, specializing in business-to-business (B2B) trades across borders, allows users to research markets, plan products, design prototypes, check regulations and find distributors, all in just a few clicks. The efficiency has reduced the time required for these processes to mere minutes instead of weeks, the company added.

Accio Agent has allowed 70 percent of the B2B trade processes to be automated, slashing the time necessary for a human to complete each process. The company said the AI platform has brought the separate processes under a singular workflow, allowing time-saving efficiency, particularly for SMEs with a limited workforce and capacity.

Kuo Zhang, vice president of Alibaba International, said Accio Agent is a “practical solution for all kinds of practical problems that often transpire while sourcing worldwide.”

“This is an AI agent specially designed to support businesses, doing the jobs of sourcing managers, product developers, engineers and market researchers all by itself,” he added.

The development of Accio Agent comes after the company recently conducted a survey for product makers worldwide.

It showed that 40 percent of global SMEs were single-person companies that chronically face limitations regarding time, resources and workforce. The new AI agent, with data from about 50 million distributors and information about 1 billion products, can offer innovative leverage to those micro-size firms with ideas to sell, according to the company.

Alibaba International cited research by Coherent, highlighting AI's growing presence in e-commerce. It said e-commerce’s reliance on AI will increase in value to $37.7 billion in 2032 from $7.68 billion this year, with a compound annual growth rate of 25.5 percent. The company also cited U.N. Trade and Development, saying the scale of global trade in 2024 reached a record value of $33 trillion.