On the day Alibaba.com announced the launch of a new AI tool and a venture with the International Olympic Committee in Paris, Retail Week caught up with president Kuo Zhang to discuss AI, helping athletes start businesses and other tech innovations in the works
As a worldwide Olympics partner, global ecommerce platform Alibaba.com showcased this partnership in Paris last week with an event announcing that it has joined the Athlete365 business accelerator programme to help more than 1,000 sportspeople transition from competition to becoming business owners.
A multiphase training scheme will be created by Alibaba to develop users’ knowledge of AI tools, global sourcing and exporting through digital marketplaces.
This is just one part of the group’s aim to help develop small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as president Kuo Zhang revealed that a new “AI-powered conversational sourcing engine” debuting in September has been created to understand natural language and turn this information into sourcing requests, provide suggestions and predict sourcing needs.
Retail Week sat down with Zhang after the event to find out more.
Tell us more about the AI sourcing engine and what it can do
“This tool is not a passive search engine; this tool is providing data, providing inspiration, insights and new ideas. We can use natural language where a user says I’m looking for new ideas on a specific product, and by understanding this request, this engine will go through the data and give specific suggestions.
“With the help of AI and the expertise of humans working together, you can come up with better solutions. When you’re running a business, you need to ask the right questions but this is extremely hard. Questions like: what product are you going to produce? What are the target marketplaces and who are the target users? And then you can start to build up this product. Many of the SMEs fail at the very beginning but with the help of AI, I think we can offer a level playing field for all SMEs.”
Have you tested it in any markets?
“We are testing with a couple of hundred internal use customers because we need to make sure that everything goes right. We see this as a game-changing user experience for the customers but all the data needs to be accurate.
“In the B2B, area all suppliers and buyers are professionals and they will view this as a professional product, so we need to get enough testing and data before we launch the product to a much broader audience.”
Why is Alibaba.com helping athletes become business leaders?
“Successful entrepreneurs and Olympic athletes share many common factors like resilience, discipline, pushing the boundaries and aiming high.
“They have a strong passion and great ideas but they don’t know where to start. Time and resources are limited and they face great competition, not only locally but globally. We are using AI, digital supply chains, globalisation strategies and all kinds of technology to enable athletes to become successful entrepreneurs.
“Last November, we launched the first generative AI tools for sellers and now these tools are available to all of our 200 million suppliers. We are seeing a lot of countries like Pakistan, Vietnam, Malaysia and India using AI now.”
What’s next? Are you currently developing or creating new tech tools to help SMEs?
“There are several things that we believe AI can do to greatly change lives. For example, the inference capability of the AI. Previously, if you’re an owner of a business, you might hire three different salespeople who will help you connect with all the buyers. The business owner then goes through every kind of lead that the salesperson is following up on, what they do right, what they say wrong and they will give them more training.
“This is time-consuming and many businesses don’t have the capability to evaluate that as well. With AI tools, we can help you to analyse what’s going on for your store including the traffic, the inquiries and the responses you get, and we’ll give you feedback about the problems either with the product or lack of traffic, and what you need to do next.”
“The next improvement of our AI tools for sellers is personalisation. We don’t want to generate the same data for everyone because when the buyers come to different sellers, they expect each one to have different styles and different responses. So we want to use tools to make sure that they can personalise their data and then personalise their response.”
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