Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group plans to launch an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered “conversational sourcing engine” in September.
The new tool will expedite the global B2B procurement process for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) by making it faster and easier to search for potential business partners and products, the company said in a press release on Wednesday (July 31).
“Traditional search engines evaluate the importance of web pages through their reciprocal links, credibility and advertising spend,” said Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com, in a release. “In this AI era, our B2B sourcing engine not only provides an intuitive and natural way to search, but also quickly and accurately matches business buyers and sellers based on track record.”
According to the release, the B2B sourcing engine understands natural language and translates it into specialized sourcing requests.
The company also announced that it will reorganize information from multiple suppliers to allow corporate buyers to make direct, side-by-side comparisons.
In addition to improved search capabilities, the sourcing engine will leverage AI and data to enable business transactions, according to the release.
“By leveraging our 25 years of expertise in digitizing various aspects of trade, including products, payments, logistics, customs and foreign exchange, AI can now recreate the experience of having a procurement professional by your side,” the company said in a release. “This technology levels the playing field, significantly reduces costs and enables small and medium-sized enterprises to become essential players in the global supply chain.”
Alibaba Group was reported in July to be using Generative AI to provide translations for sellers on its platform, negotiate refunds, and perform other tasks to bolster the company’s efforts to expand overseas.
The company will form a team of 100 engineers dedicated to developing generative AI applications for overseas e-commerce businesses in the second half of 2022, spend a year identifying use cases for the technology, and now has approximately 500,000 sellers using the AI tools it has deployed to date.
In June, Alibaba launched a new B2B-focused marketplace solution, Alibaba Guaranteed, which provides a centralized platform where businesses can search for products, compare prices and order in just a few clicks.
The solution aims to make cross-border trade “as easy as buying shoes online from your favorite retailer,” Zhang said at the time.
