BABA’s Accio Pushes AI From Chat to Execution

0:00back to market on close, I'm Sam Vardas on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Joining us now, I'm very pleased to say, is Ramatani, who's the head of marketing and commercial strategy, US at AliBaba.com. We're also nice of you to join the program. So this week you guys came out with your new AI agent at Axio. It's been described as like the chat GPT of sourcing. Just give us a sense of what exactly this is. Yeah, it's quite close to how you described it, Sam. But we've taken it a step further and launched what we call Axio work. And then to put it quite simply, it's just a plug-and-play AI agent for businesses. And we backed it with 26 years of our B2B information and transaction history to build a fully agentic system. So if you have a business idea, Axio work can actually stand up a full online store, on say Shopify after coming up with the idea sourcing the products, negotiating with the suppliers and managing that entire supply chain for you.

1:02So it's kind of a shift as we look at it from AI that just talks to you to AI that works for you. Right. And obviously, AliBaba, being a Chinese company, you are obviously working in the US International Arm of AliBaba.com. So can you just give our viewers a sense of how difficult that sourcing was before? Because I've spent a lot of time in China where I've had people who have come to me and said, look, I've got a prototype. But I don't know how to get into a factory. You've got to find the right people. You've got to find the right materials. There's got to be the trust. You've got to get your quality control guys. There's so many ducts that you have to put in a row. And I have actually heard of people using the Axio product. So that is really interesting. But just give us a sense of what that's addressing right now. Yeah, I think you described it really well, Sam. You know, if we look at the challenges that business owners face, there's so many steps in that global sourcing. But our mission in North

2:04America and the rest of the world is just to continue to enable the rise of that small business owner. So, you know, we want to give the, say, the one person shop in New Jersey the same operational power as a global corporation. So what we're trying to do is automate the really time-consuming tasks from like cross-border customs, VAT submissions, the logistics, the product research, so that we can lower the barrier to entry for these U.S. entrepreneurs, which are our biggest customer on Alibaba.com to compete. Who is the competition in your world when it comes to this global sourcing by the way of artificial intelligence? I guess it's important if we look at the landscape of artificial intelligence. There's a lot of big tech players that are building incredible tools for digital offices. And they're really, really good at helping you write a memo, summarize a meeting, execute specific tasks. But I think

3:09there's a really big gap between what's happening in office work and what's happening in business actual business operations. So I think, you know, a lot of AI tools are hitting a wall when they need to leave that browser. So we built this agentic system to actually enable the entire physical supply chain. And we're integrating not with just a calendar or Microsoft Word. We're integrating with global factories, logistics networks, custom compliance, as well as the open source AI environment. Okay, so you're helping entrepreneurs and businesses. I do want to speak about AI disruption in this market because everybody is fixated on that at the moment. Are you being disrupted or are you the disruptor? That's a great question. It's a little bit of both. You know, I think the way it's important to look at the AI landscape right now, it's not what's already happened,

4:13right? The big disruption in AI has happened with these big models. Now the next frontier, which we're looking to step into is the ones with the best context for that. So, you know, we're looking at things like how can you get to as close to hallucination free as possible? The way we're approaching that is actually just backing our agent with real-time information. So we have 26 years of transaction history. We can back that with a billion actual products. And then actually look to cross validate that with some of our competitors and partners in the space. So looking at Amazon transaction data, looking at Walmart transaction data or TikTok shop. And then being able to say, here's what you're sourcing those products for. Here's what they can actually sell for. And we can validate that and tell the business owner that they can make a specific margin by sourcing products from a certain place. So that's what we're looking to do. We're a bit of

5:14in the middle of a disruptive phase, but attempting to be that disruptor. Okay, interesting. So not so easy if I say wanted to go out and replicate your business tomorrow, which I have no time to do, Robert. Just in case I did, that's going to be cheaper and faster, right? That's right. Yeah. And the goal is to enable you to be able to do business better and faster. It's not for you to come and reinvent the wheel. It's for you to do what you need to do as a business owner. Yeah, fascinating stuff. Really appreciate it. Well, we have to leave it there. But thank you so much for joining us here. We'll try to get in soon. Ramakhtani, who's the head of at marketing and commercial strategy, us at alibaba.com.