During this year’s Singles‘ Day shopping festival, e-commerce platforms and small businesses deployed artificial intelligence agents to manage overseas orders, analyze social media trends, and handle customer inquiries, shifting the annual promotion toward automated supply and demand matching.
AI Agents Handle Overseas Orders for One-Person Startups
Sitting in front of his computer, one-person company founder Zhang Qianchao used more than 80 artificial intelligence agents on the global e-commerce workspace Accio to process a growing list of international orders, m.voc.com.cn reported.
The digital employees divided tasks across different operational fronts. A market research agent gathered overseas social media trends, a product design agent drafted sketches for new baseball caps, and a customer service agent automatically replied to international inquiries.
“This was hard to imagine in the past, but this year, I really relied on myself and more than 80 agents to take on overseas orders one after another,” Zhang told m.voc.com.cn.
The custom baseball cap entrepreneur said the technology allowed a cross-border newcomer with zero industry background to capture technical dividends. With the shopping festival marking a traditional peak season for cross-border e-commerce, Zhang managed more than 20 brand client orders.
“Agents can help me not only in design and analysis, but also efficiently connect with me in customer acquisition,” Zhang told m.voc.com.cn.
Platforms Integrate AI Across Core Operating Segments
Alibaba Global B2B President Zhang Kuo said e-commerce platforms experienced a notable trend this year as artificial intelligence accelerated its penetration into procurement, sales, and management operations, pushing both supply and demand sides toward two-way intelligence.
More than 10 million small and medium-sized enterprises operated on Accio globally, while token usage volume multiplied tenfold year-over-year. This year’s “Singles’ Day” e-commerce promotion saw token usage appear as an independent category on multiple e-commerce platforms, turning intangible computing power services into orderable products.
Major platforms turned the shopping event into an artificial intelligence testing ground. Alibaba integrated Qwen into Taobao, JD.com deployed its AI shopping assistant Dongdong, Douyin Ecommerce connected Doubao into its mall, and Kuaishou called for efficiency gains and cross-domain synergy.
JD.com upgraded its Jiimai AI management center from providing tools to delivering results, pushing merchant operations from single-point efficiency to full-link intelligence. The system gathered over 60 AI tools covering product selection, marketing, fulfillment, and customer service.
The Jiimai AI tools helped 80 percent of new merchants substantially improve operational efficiency while providing daily support and business advice to 96 percent of new merchants, according to JD.com representatives.
Data Analysis Transforms Purchasing Into Intent Recognition
Alibaba Group Senior Vice President and Tmall President Liu Bo explained that artificial intelligence in the purchasing domain utilized multimodal data analysis to identify latent consumer intentions.
“If a hiking enthusiast often goes hiking, they will inevitably experience knee discomfort,” Liu said, describing how a large model might suggest nutritional deficiencies and recommend supplements when questioned by a user, directly converting the interaction into a purchase.
Liu said that scene-based recommendations generated conversion rates noticeably higher than generalized advertising. He added that technology moved e-commerce away from a model where people search for goods toward one where goods understand people, bridging demand fulfillment and demand creation.
AI Agents Transform Business Experience into Digital Services
Researcher Hong Yong from the Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation viewed the deep integration of artificial intelligence as a transformation of business experience into on-demand digital services, functioning as an operating system for small businesses.
1688 Vice President Wang Qiang predicted that agent penetration rates will climb steadily, altering traditional commercial logic if both buyers and sellers deploy their own digital representatives.
“If you want your customers’ and consumers’ digital agents to find you accurately, your products must become digital models that can be read by AI, including standardized parameters, traceable quality, trustworthy fulfillment, and guaranteed after-sales service,” Wang said.
Industry insiders also observed that while efficiency gains materialized across retail operations, the economic balance between model call costs and actual order conversion rates required longer-term observation.
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