By Hamza Faisal
Alibaba is turning its AI agent into the operating system of Chinese e-commerce. At the company's annual Singles' Day media briefing on Thursday, Tmall president Liu Bo announced that starting next year, artificial intelligence will "comprehensively enter the internal enterprise workflows" of every merchant selling on Taobao and Tmall — with the company's Qwen Work agent as the central vehicle. The rollout is expected to reach all sellers by the end of 2027.
The scope is sweeping: inventory management, advertising, customer service and pricing will all run through Qwen Work, Alibaba's enterprise AI assistant. An e-commerce-specific version of the tool began testing on October 14, the day before Liu's announcement, and is purpose-built for sellers managing operations across multiple platforms. The remarks were first reported by the South China Morning Post and independently confirmed by KR Asia and Inside Retail Asia.
A bet on agents, not dashboards
The move signals where Alibaba believes commerce software is headed. Rather than handing merchants another analytics dashboard, Qwen Work promises to run the business itself: restocking shelves, adjusting prices, answering customer queries and steering ad spend without a human clicking through menus. Liu said the platform's AI rollout over the past year "exceeded expectations," with sellers already using platform-level AI tools for product launches, advertising and customer service — and the merchant-agent push is the next step.
On the consumer side, the same transformation is already underway. A Qwen-powered shopping assistant launched in May helps shoppers compare products, virtually try on clothes and select promotional discounts — all part of Alibaba's attempt to make conversational AI the default way people buy and sell online.
Timing it with Singles' Day
The announcement lands just ahead of Alibaba's flagship Singles' Day shopping festival, whose official sales begin this week with a record one million global brands expected to take part. The company launched the event in 2009 and is using this year's festival as a proving ground for AI-driven growth, with deeper Qwen integration across the ecosystem.
The context is an escalating AI arms race in Chinese commerce. Alibaba faces pressure from JD.com and PDD Holdings, and Taobao executives say the marketplace will differentiate through a curated supply system and a wide catalogue rather than pure discounting. The AI push is also backed by enormous capital: CEO Eddie Wu has said the company has already spent half of a planned 380 billion yuan AI investment for 2026–2029 and expects the AI capital expenditure to break even within three years.
For merchants, though, there is no real choice in the matter. The workflows Qwen Work will govern are baked into the platform layer that sellers depend on to reach hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers — opting out of the agent effectively means opting out of China's largest e-commerce ecosystem. For international brands among this year's record Singles' Day participants, the rollout also raises data-governance questions as operational data flows through a single operator's AI systems.
By Hamza Faisal
