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Welcome back! Last week, my colleague Qianer tested an AI agent inside Alibaba’s Qwen app, which resembles ChatGPT. She asked to get a ticket to see Pegasus 3, a comedy film about a race car driver that has been topping the Chinese box office. The agent found the nearest theater showing the movie and recommended seats and screening times for later in the day. Liu then authorized the booking. As OpenAI, Google and Amazon race to make AI that can help people buy things, China’s Alibaba is moving faster in showing how AI agents can evolve into personal shopping assistants. During Alibaba’s two-week-long marketing campaign to promote Qwen’s e-commerce capabilities during China’s Lunar New Year holiday last month, the AI app handled nearly 200 million orders for everything from drinks and groceries to movie tickets and flight bookings, the firm said. The campaign boosted the Qwen app’s daily active users to 73.5 million from 17 million before the holiday, according to a report this week by Morgan Stanley analysts. If the Qwen agent-usage numbers are accurate, it would be another example of the Chinese tech industry’s ability to take the ball from American tech firms and run with it, as it has done time and again. For instance, if you think the American AI app developers have gone ga-ga for OpenClaw for developing agents that take over computers, China is taking that to the next level too, as I reported earlier this week. Getting an AI agent to handle shopping orders and other transactions such as travel bookings involves numerous technical challenges. The AI needs to understand and work with data from the complex world of ecommerce, where sellers’ product lineups, inventories and prices are constantly changing. OpenAI’s effort to turn ChatGPT into an AI shopping agent has run into difficulties, and the company and its early partners, Shopify and Stripe, have been working on ways to better standardize and share merchants’ product data, The Information reported in January. (Last night, my colleagues also reported OpenAI was scaling back plans for shopping inside ChatGPT.) Alibaba has some advantages in tackling those challenges, compared to American firms like Amazon, Google and OpenAI. Alibaba and its affiliate Ant control all the key components agents need to buy stuff, from in-house AI models to e-commerce to payments. Alibaba also operates Amap, a Chinese equivalent of Google Maps that collects nationwide data on restaurants and shops, as well as major online travel service Fliggy and ticketing app Damai. The potential is enormous provided Alibaba can break down internal walls and mobilize all of its business units to integrate with the Qwen app. But that hasn’t happened at a meaningful scale yet with Alibaba’s crown jewel, the Taobao shopping site. When Qianer asked Qwen to help her buy a sofa bed, the AI merely presented her with a “buying guide” with general recommendations. Even after Liu asked Qwen to choose some options from Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace, it didn’t direct her to specific Taobao product pages. Alibaba’s work to connect Qwen with Taobao’s e-commerce platform is a laborious task that will take time, and so far, the integration has only been completed for a limited number of product categories, according to the employee familiar with the effort. Alibaba has developed internal tools for merchants on its Taobao shopping service to reorganize data on products and inventories in ways that are easy for Alibaba’s AI models to process, according to an Alibaba employee familiar with the effort. But it takes time to integrate Taobao’s vast assortments of products into the Qwen app. Alibaba’s AI team also has been working closely with Ant Group to build new technology to make it easier to connect the Qwen app with Alipay, Ant’s digital wallet, the employee added. For its part, Amazon says the Rufus AI assistant in its shopping app can find and automatically buy items in Amazon’s store and other stores and its voice assistant Alexa+ can book rides and make restaurant reservations, though it isn’t clear how many people have used these agent-like features. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu has told managers that integrating Alibaba’s core services such as e-commerce into the Qwen AI app is a top priority, according to an Alibaba manager. Making Qwen competitive is critical for Alibaba because of executives’ beliefs that AI chatbot apps and agents could eventually become consumers’ primary tools for all online activities. Alibaba’s current agent is still limited in what it can do. For tasks that involve bookings or purchases, the user usually needs to get involved multiple times during the process. Bookings don’t always work. When Liu asked Qwen to make a restaurant reservation, the app told her it booked a table at 7 p.m. But when she later called the restaurant to double check, she found out that no booking was made. Qwen does a little better with travel bookings. When Liu asked the AI to help her pick flights and a hotel for a trip to Osaka during China’s Labor Day holiday in early May, it initially showed general recommendations and some money-saving tips. But when Liu asked Qwen to use Alibaba’s Fliggy travel booking site to come up with options, the AI quickly presented her with multiple clickable cards for specific flights and hotels that are available for those dates.
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