BlueFocus, Alibaba.com, Baidu push AI deeper into marketing and global commerce

BlueFocus and AhaCreator said on Sept. 10 in Beijing that they will combine BlueFocus's global marketing services, client resources and brand growth experience with AhaCreator's creator network and AI agents. BlueFocus will offer AhaCreator's creator resources to advertisers needing overseas influencer marketing. AhaCreator will provide a network covering 5 million global creators, including 150,000 active onboarded creators with transaction records.

AhaCreator's platform includes more than ten AI agents described as '7x24 actively operating influencer marketing AI employees.' They cover influencer matching and outreach, negotiation, order management, content verification, delivery tracking, publishing management, data aggregation, cross-border settlement and contract management. The two companies aim to replace manual searches, emails and spreadsheets with a traceable, scalable workflow.

BlueFocus was founded in 1996 and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange ChiNext in 2010. It is a global top-10 marketing communications group. In 2023 it released its AI² strategy and launched the Blue AI multimodal marketing engine.

At Alibaba.com's CoCreate 2026, more than 15,000 US SMEs attended the Los Angeles Convention Center on Sept. 9, up from 3,000 last year. The event was held the same day as Apple's autumn product launch. Guests included Fiserv CEO Takis Georgakopoulos, NBA legend Earvin Magic Johnson, Beyond CEO Marcus Lemonis, Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor and producer Barry Poznick.

Alibaba.com President Zhang Kuo said 'the future of B2B is A2A—Agent to Agent doing business.' Overseas buyers on the platform are shifting from keyword searches to natural-language requests handled by AI, which discovers trends, refines products, screens suppliers, negotiates terms and manages orders. AI multimodal search traffic grew more than 132%, while AI token consumption on Accio, Alibaba.com's global e-commerce AI workspace, rose sixfold in four months.

Zhang said US buyers grew 34% and Brazilian buyers more than 40%. Sports equipment demand was strong across the Americas ahead of the World Cup; the lab-grown diamond market grew tenfold in five years; data center-related electrical equipment, especially liquid cooling and optical fiber, grew quickly.

Accio said its global users grew more than 30 times in the past year, and 10 million SMEs now use it. At CoCreate, Accio open-sourced CommerceAgentBench on GitHub. The benchmark uses data from 10 million active SME users, 1.6 million real conversations and 200,000 execution trajectories, and contains 107 real end-to-end business tasks, such as finding valid leads from 300 messy emails, detecting a payment scam, calculating landed costs and booking a shipping route among three carriers. Accio said token costs on 44 core tasks were 50% lower than general Agents.

Zhang described the agent formula as Agent = model x harness x context. He said an AI too expensive to use every day is the same as no AI for a small business, and Accio aims to make business AI practical and affordable. Accio has connected domestic platforms including Taobao, Tmall, Pinduoduo, JD.com, Douyin Store and 1688, as well as overseas platforms including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Temu and TikTok.

Baidu Marketing held its 'AI Creates Without Boundaries, Smart Placement Without Worries' product launch on Sept. 9 and released Qindao 3.0, a marketing creative agent, plus an upgraded intelligent placement product. Baidu Group Vice President Ping Xiaoli said Baidu Marketing has built a full-link closed loop covering creative production, all-domain placement and long-term operations. She said Qindao 3.0 makes creative production accessible and smart placement makes professional decisions more widely available.

Qindao has evolved from an AIGC creation tool into a marketing creative agent. Baidu Commercial System Commercial Technology Department General Manager Liu Lin said the upgrade enters multi-agent collaboration, with creative and placement agents working together. Qindao has served more than 150,000 clients, improved human efficiency by more than 300% and raised monetization capacity per placement unit by more than 13.6%, according to Baidu.

The image agent can produce marketing images for Baidu's search and feed scenarios from one sentence, a landing page link or a reference image. Baidu said Meituan used it to batch-produce images, lifting run volume by more than 20% and image click-through rate by more than 13%. A Beijing law firm generated 70% of its materials with the image agent and cut conversion costs by 19%. The video agent handles creative analysis, planning, storyboard editing and final settings in a natural-language conversation. Fliggy used it to produce differentiated travel videos, increasing run volume by 18% and click-through rate by 9%.

Baidu also upgraded placement. AIMax moved from a volume-running tool to a system combining expansion, cost control and stable performance. It decomposes campaigns into atomic combinations of traffic, targeting, bids and creatives, runs AB tests and automatically creates campaigns, replaces manual 7x24 monitoring, and integrates all-domain data to tier audience value and filter invalid leads. AIMax covers all placement scenarios and industries, with 44.2% client penetration, and more than 6,000 clients have entrusted 100% of their accounts to it.

The AI placement assistant is a one-stop, full-link agent that Baidu says understands business, makes decisions and executes. It performs pre-bid competitor analysis, locates anomalies in 30 seconds during campaigns and produces diagnosis and optimization strategies afterward. Baidu Marketing now presents a three-piece solution: Qindao Agent for creative production and viral fission, AIMax for intelligent placement, and the AI placement assistant for data diagnosis and strategy output.

Partners reported results. Jingmei Advertising said effective marketing materials rose more than 60% after fully adopting Qindao. BeiChen Dental cut conversion costs by 46%, Yuefeng Beauty Academy raised conversion rate by 57%, and Dawang Membrane Structure increased conversion rate by 93% using Baidu's tools.