Accio and Digital Trade Expo Launch AI Agent for More Than 2,000 Exhibitors

A foreign trade businessman surnamed Zhuang tried the agent before others, according to the report. He typed a simple request: “I want to cooperate with exhibitors in Hangzhou.” The agent told him there were 43 Hangzhou exhibitors in the Silk Road E-commerce Exhibition Area, Hall 6A, and recommended five of them, listing exhibitor names and booth numbers. Zhuang said he already uses Accio for cross-border business and had not expected to use it at the expo, adding that the time saved on navigating the show could be used for direct negotiations.

Accio, built by Alibaba for SMEs, appeared at the fifth Digital Trade Expo with the agent and a display of AI applications across business processes, including market insight, product selection and publishing, store operations, advertising spend analysis and customer reception. During the expo, Accio set up an installation activity on the “Digital Trade Avenue,” where staff provided one-on-one guidance for visitors to install and try the product, the report said.

More than 10 million SMEs worldwide are already using Accio to do business, according to data cited in the report. After merchants set business goals, Accio can break down tasks and call different specialized agents to execute them together, organizing work that was previously spread across different roles and tools, reducing repetitive operations and allowing operators to focus more on market judgment and business decisions.

The report said SME demand for AI is shifting from “giving answers” to “delivering results.” Zhang Qianchao, a post-1997 entrepreneur from Lishui, Zhejiang, who started a business in Hangzhou, leads eight agents on Accio as an AI team selling baseball caps to foreign customers. The eight agents handle market research, product design, product development, policy interpretation and customer reception. With task relay among the agents, a product selection and design process that used to take two to three weeks was compressed to one day. In less than two months, Zhang sold more than 3,000 baseball caps on Alibaba.com to markets in Europe, America and Africa, which the report described as a new OPC startup speed in the AI era.

After connecting domestic e-commerce platforms including Taobao, Tmall, 1688, Pinduoduo, JD.com and Douyin Store, Accio announced at the CoCreate Summit in Los Angeles in early September that it had also connected overseas platforms including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Temu and TikTok Shop, according to the report. The company described the result as “multiple businesses, one AI workbench.”

Zhang Kuo, president of Alibaba.com, said, “The future of B2B is A2A—Agent to Agent doing business.” As buyers and sellers increasingly use agents, the interaction model for global trade is changing: buyer agents understand procurement needs, find products and compare options, while seller agents analyze markets, organize supply and respond to customers. Both sides use agents to improve information exchange and transaction coordination.

From connecting supply and demand to helping companies advance specific operational tasks, AI is becoming new infrastructure for digital trade, the report said. Accio’s appearance at the Digital Trade Expo also signaled that competition in enterprise AI is shifting from demonstrating model capabilities to producing real business results, and that the measure of AI’s value will increasingly depend on whether it can continuously create operating value for SMEs at a controllable cost.