Alibaba to Launch AI-Based Sourcing Engine for B2B E-Commerce

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will launch an AI-powered conversational search engine in September, saying the tool will revolutionize the global search process for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), making it more intuitive and highly efficient.

The company said its deal discovery module, designed for B2B e-commerce, synthesizes massive amounts of information, interprets sourcing needs using natural language processing, matches buyers with products and suppliers with unprecedented accuracy, and provides advanced tools for frictionless sourcing decision-making.

According to Alibaba, this approach addresses the inefficiencies of conventional search methods, which are often time-consuming, require a lot of manual intervention, and require tedious data categorization processes to find the right business partners and products.

“Traditional search engines evaluate a website’s validity through linking, credibility and ad spend. In this AI era, the B2B sourcing engine offers an intuitive and organic way to search, as well as quickly and accurately match buyers and sellers of businesses based on their proven track record,” Alibaba CEO Kuo Zhang said in a statement.

The launch follows the company’s decision in 2023 to launch a generative artificial intelligence (AI) toolkit under the “Aidge” brand. The tool, part of the company’s Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, has been adopted by about 500,000 merchants, with daily API usage reaching 50 million connections. Deployed across more than 40 e-commerce scenarios, including product offering refinement, marketing, customer service, and automation, the AI ​​has significantly improved content quality, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction, Alibaba said. For example, its features include a virtual clothing try-on tool and 24/7 AI customer service, which boosted AliExpress Choice’s conversion rates from pre-sale inquiries by 29% in June.