With industry giants Tencent and Baidu all doubling down on artificial intelligence (AI) and disruptors DeepSeek and Manus bringing the technology and application to higher levels, it’s no surprise that e-commerce goliath Alibaba is now “all in” with AI.
It was reported on 18 March that CEO Eddie Wu Yongming notified all departments within Alibaba that business in the group will be “completely AI-fied”. In 2025, the performance of every department will be gauged by how they used AI to grow their business. The core e-commerce branches, including Taobao and Tmall, have been encouraged to use more AI technology. All departments are now working with Qwen (通义千问), Alibaba’s AI model, on applications that would boost efficiency and user experience.
Alibaba is also reportedly working on a series of native apps that are based on AI. Some of the apps will be released later this year. Sources say that the company is now working on a “killer application” that would be more popular than Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app. Alibaba has also just released its open-source AI model Qwen QwQ-32B, benchmarking against DeepSeek R1. A new version of the AI app Quark was also announced on 13 March, an “all-in-one” AI app that is the new flagship of Alibaba’s AI efforts.
Last month, Wu announced that the group will be focusing on three businesses: e-commerce in China and abroad, AI+cloud computing services and internet platforms. Wu said that AI would be the centre of Alibaba’s strategy and would be investing 380 billion RMB (52.54 billion USD) in the next 3 years to build cloud and AI infrastructure, more than the past 10 years combined. Although Alibaba hasn’t responded to the latest report, it is nonetheless clear that they are moving into an AI-centric strategy.
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