Alibaba International Station AI Business Assistant Online Digging for Digital Foreign Trade Dividends

Digital trade is becoming a new trend in the development of international trade today and a new growth point for future international trade development.According to customs data, in 2022, the scale of service trade that can be digitally delivered in China reached 2

Digital trade is becoming a new trend in the development of international trade today and a new growth point for future international trade development.

According to customs data, in 2022, the scale of service trade that can be digitally delivered in China reached 2.51 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7.8%, ranking fifth globally. In the first half of this year, the import and export volume of cross-border e-commerce reached 1.1 trillion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 16.6%, which is faster than last year and accounts for 5.5% of the proportion of imported and exported goods during the same period.

It is worth noting that China's ability to support independent innovation in emerging technologies for digital trade is constantly increasing. Especially this year, the outbreak of AI technology has brought new changes to the foreign trade industry, which has also overturned the "old" concepts of many foreign traders.

For example, Dong Chun, the founder of Dongyi Yangshan Technology, a foreign trade company that enjoys tinkering with various "high-tech" technologies, had previously felt that:

AI is still far from practical application, especially in such a complex foreign trade industry like ours

But his idea was completely changed a few days after trying out the Alibaba International Trade AI "Business Assistant".

Today, Alibaba International Station officially launched its foreign trade AI product "Business Assistant". Several Alibaba International Station merchants who participated in internal testing have revealed that the biggest surprise of this AI product is that "it really understands foreign trade". According to internal testing data, this AI product has increased the exposure of merchants by over 19%. This practical effect of directly entering the industry is something that no other AI product on the market has ever had.

Not only that, but for Dong Chun, a foreign trader who specializes in exporting medium-sized and large coffee equipment, this AI product has also helped them generate a product map that is recognized as the best by the entire team.

Previously, it was not an easy task to capture product images of large devices with scenes that could attract overseas customers. However, now the AI business assistant at Alibaba International Station has solved this practical problem that has been troubling them for many years in just a few seconds.

To achieve practical results and solve practical problems - Amidst the chaos of numerous demonstration AI platforms, the AI on Alibaba International Station appears somewhat unique: only practical.

It is reported that the AI business assistant of Alibaba International Station is embedded in the actual link of foreign trade business, and its functions are completely based on the actual needs of merchants in foreign trade: intelligent product distribution, intelligent reception, intelligent diagnosis. The effect is also based on real-time market insights, providing practical suggestions quickly and intelligently based on foreign trade scenarios, and generating practical materials such as images and videos with one click.

This is equivalent to finding a serious job for AI for the first time. In fact, it's not difficult to showcase the various fancy functions of AI, but it's not easy to help AI find serious jobs. When AI really starts "going to work," it has to generate its true ultimate answer in every user call: what can it do for the industry? Will it take effect? How much output can it bring?

AI has helped us generate the best product image recognized by the entire team to date

According to Dong Chun, the founder of Dongyi Yangshan Technology, a foreign trade company, they export medium to large coffee equipment on Alibaba International Station, and product images can only be taken from a few very single angles in factories and exhibition halls. In recent years, only using more scene like images can attract more overseas customers. Dong Chun can only ask some customers with particularly good relationships to take some photos of the products during use, but the overall image material is still quite scarce.

This has become a long-standing problem for the company's entrepreneurship for many years.

But Dong Chun never expected that the AI "business assistant" could provide him with a professional "visual team" at zero cost. The AI business assistant helped us generate the best product image recognized by the entire team to date, and everyone praised this image, "Dong Chun said.

In the testing phase, the company's operations students only need to use existing material images to debug and optimize, and the business assistant helps them generate many scene like images, such as coffee shops and airports. The problem of lacking image materials has been solved easily.

Moreover, the images generated by AI business assistants often unexpectedly incorporate some "agile" small aids. Like Fei Fan, the founder of Zhongxing Group, who has been specializing in exporting children's educational toys and furniture for over 9 years, he introduced that when he uses AI business assistants to generate scene maps for children's slides, AI will "quietly" place a toy car next to the slide, "which is very spiritual

Being able to solve the "old problems" for foreign trade companies that have been in the industry for many years also means lowering the threshold for foreign trade for new entrepreneurial teams entering the field.

Fang Zefu, the general manager of Shenzhen Fangcheng Technology Co., Ltd., which is also an internal testing merchant, believes that for a startup team of 10-20 people, doubling the work efficiency of each employee through AI means achieving geometric growth in the company's efficiency.

He preliminarily estimated that with the help of AI's "Business Assistant" intelligent product distribution function, "full-time operations could only publish dozens or twenty product links every day, but now they can produce sixty or seventy product links every day." Currently, Fang Zefu's company has launched AI optimized product maps in Alibaba's international store, During the internal testing phase, we observed that the number of sample orders and orders has increased by 20%, "he said.

The biggest surprise: "It really understands foreign trade"

To enable AI to achieve its current effect, the AI products on Alibaba International Station have been approved as early as April this year, undergoing multiple rounds of discussion and iteration of technical routes. By the end of August, they began internal testing for some merchants, and were officially launched on November 1st and open to merchants.

After about 6 months of polishing, Alibaba International carefully sorted out the biggest and most challenging issues for merchants in foreign trade, and trained AI with Alibaba International's 24 years of understanding of digital foreign trade and real-time insights into overseas markets. It's equivalent to having AI study an "international trade major".

This gives the AI on Alibaba International a professional advantage that no other AI on the market has. In the internal test, the biggest surprise that merchants generally gave feedback was that they really understand foreign trade.

It is reported that the AI on Alibaba International Station can even provide many experienced foreign trade experts with new insights that were easily overlooked in the past.

For example, a merchant who has been doing aromatherapy for many years, after having their AI business assistant check and optimize their aromatherapy products launched on Alibaba International Station, within a few seconds, the AI business assistant extracts multiple keywords that were previously hidden in the product category, such as "handmade" (handmade) and "Eco friendly" (ecological and environmental protection), and places them prominently in the title, telling them that these words are more popular in overseas markets, Because overseas buyers have been particularly concerned about environmental protection and other topics in recent years.

The merchant doubtfully applied the AI modified product information and link to go online again, and the traffic really increased.

This became the merchant's "mechanical night".

The so-called "mechanical deity" in ancient Greek drama refers to the sudden appearance of a powerful "god" who solves a difficult problem when the plot becomes stuck and difficult to solve - this is often seen as a clumsy plot design technique. But in the current wave of AI "emerging", this has become the most appropriate term to describe the impact that AI has had on practitioners after integrating with the industry.

After tasting the sweetness, he further instructed the AI business assistant to optimize all the products he had launched on international websites for many years. In just a few minutes, the work was completed. Throughout the entire process, what this aromatherapy merchant did was constantly clicking on "Apply", "Confirm", and "Okay".

Not only in the product release process, but also in the communication process with overseas customers, the role of AI business assistants is very obvious. Fang Zefu, the general manager of Shenzhen Fangcheng Technology, has a deep feeling about this: "It can not only summarize the context, but also polish the script." This has reduced the number of conversations that originally required 30 back and forth to 10, and even saved the list that would have "miscarried" if only 1-2 sentences were spoken.

Fang Zefu revealed that within a month, AI business assistants helped save at least 28 orders that were almost certain to "miscarry" in the past.

Who is grabbing the first wave of AI foreign trade dividends?

When AI can produce practical effects on specific enterprises at the micro level, it is not too far from its impact on the entire industry at the macro level. This is the process of AI's mechanical deification of the entire industry.

According to data released by the General Administration of Customs, the total import and export value of China's goods trade in the first three quarters was 30.8 trillion yuan, and foreign trade imports and exports operated smoothly and actively improved. From a quarterly perspective, imports and exports gradually increased, with imports and exports reaching 9.72 trillion yuan, 10.29 trillion yuan, and 10.79 trillion yuan in the first, second, and third quarters, respectively. From a monthly perspective, September saw a consecutive two month on month growth, with the scale reaching a new high in a single month of the year.

At the same time, according to the data from the semi annual report of digital foreign trade on Alibaba International Station, the online overseas demand in the first half of the year increased by 33% year-on-year, and 90% of industries achieved rapid growth online, which further indicates that high-quality overseas business opportunities are rapidly transferring to the online market.

In the gradually warming foreign trade situation and the new digital foreign trade environment, quickly seizing market opportunities through AI and seizing the first wave of AI foreign trade dividends will become a common choice for all businesses.

And the 'all merchants' here are not just existing foreign trade practitioners. From the current test results, it can be seen that the biggest effect of the AI business assistant on Alibaba International Station is to lower the threshold for foreign trade, which is expected to activate a large number of previously "amazed" domestic merchants, making their process of increasing foreign trade sales channels much smoother.

In this internal testing of merchants, many people believe that if they had such professional AI tools when they started their business, their determination to turn to foreign trade would have been made earlier.

Looking back at the several golden periods of China's foreign trade since this century: firstly, the implementation of a large number of trade facilitation measures after joining the WTO; Furthermore, the rise of digital foreign trade platforms has enabled people to do foreign trade business without having to travel around the world... After systematically lowering the threshold for foreign trade, they have attracted a large number of merchants to enter, bringing dividends to the entire industry.

Data shows that the number of enterprises with actual import and export performance in China currently ranges from several hundred thousand to one million, while the total market entities in China are in the range of tens to billions. Even if one tenth of these enterprises can smoothly open up the foreign trade market with the help of AI, its impact will be no less than the second "WTO accession".

In fact, at the beginning of the year, Zhang Kuao, the president of Alibaba International Station, believed in a media interview that "for every foreign trader, 2023 will be the first year of market changes and technological changes

Every time technology innovation occurs, the first entrants will undoubtedly receive the first wave of dividends.

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