More than half of the roughly 200,000 merchants on Alibaba.com were already using its AI applications on a weekly basis, company president Zhang Kuo told the South China Morning Post in an interview on Monday. Alibaba owns the Post.
Introduced in early 2024 , these AI tools are designed to assist sellers in marketing, product management, customer engagement and risk control – which form part of efforts to expand Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce business.
“I believe that by the end of this year, [the adoption rate] should be 100 per cent,” Zhang said. “In the end, when they feel that these parts are easier to manage and [the AI agents] provide better performance … those parts should be taken care of by AI.”
“We have confidence in that,” he said.
His assessment reflects Hangzhou -based Alibaba’s sharpened focus on cloud computing and AI, following the company’s commitment to invest at least 380 billion yuan (US$52 billion) to enhance its infrastructure related to those technologies over the next three years. That marks the largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business in China.
