I recently visited Alibaba’s new Xixi campus in Hangzhou. And visiting tech companies is just about my favorite activity. My goal for Alibaba was to look into their international ecommerce division AIDC, which includes Lazada, Daraz, Trendyol and AliExpress.

AliExpress was of particular interest. It has been the breakout star for Alibaba this past year. For example, in May 2024, AIDC’s quarterly revenue jumped 45% year-on-year (for the three months ending in March). With AliExpress Choice as the primary driver.

And in November the head of AIDC (Fan Jiang) was made CEO of both international and domestic ecommerce. That makes him the head of all ecommerce for Alibaba.

My primary interest during my visit was to identify GenAI use cases for cross-border ecommerce. It’s one of the topics on my short list of interest. Cross-border is a big growth area in ecommerce. And I’m curious how GenAI can accelerate this. Note: AIDC has a separate business unit just for GenAI (i.e., not within Alibaba proper or Alibaba Cloud).

I came away with 3 GenAI use cases in cross-border ecommerce that were particularly interesting.

GenAI Use Case 1: Cross Border Tools for Merchants

Keep in mind, Alibaba is in the marketplace business. So, we are dealing with two user groups.

• There are merchants and brands.
• And there are buyers, which can be consumers or businesses. AIDC includes Alibaba.com (a cross-border B2B business).

Big surprise, a key GenAI use case at AIDC is targeting internal efficiencies for merchants and brands. Generative AI is just really good at increasing productivity. And internal use is the safest way to start. It doesn’t impact your customers if you screw it up.

However, cross-border ecommerce has lots of additional inefficiencies that domestic ecommerce doesn’t have. For example:

Language and communication is a real problem. AIDC is dealing with +200 markets around the world. That means lots of language barriers. Which is a problem for taking orders, doing customer service, and so on. It’s not a small problem.

A simple use case for this is using NLP to create product listings and product instructions in different languages. Ok. That’s helpful but nothing special.

A more interesting GenAI use case is cross-border marketing. That means translating sales copy. And making different versions of photos. And even different versions of marketing videos. And these are not just about translation. Using GenAI for cross-border marketing is about adapting content to different customer types and behaviors. The product photos and copy you use in China are very different than those used in Kenya. GenAI based cross-border marketing is about maximizing effectiveness. It’s not just about capturing productivity gains (i.e., not taking photos around the world and just using AI-generated photos).

The most interesting GenAI cross-border use cases are in videos, which includes speech and other audio. If you are a skincare brand in Korea, how do you create marketing and/or educational videos for +50 different markets around the world? That are effective? That have different languages?

This brings us to GenAI created digital avatars. And virtual live streamers. If you want to sell with a live streamer, how do you do that if 50 different countries? Well, GenAI is getting really good at this. You can now create virtual models that can sell in real time to different markets and languages. You can have an African live streamer for Kenya. Talking about the products. Talking about current local promotions and deals. Talking about this in relation to current trending topics in the county. And so on.

Basically, GenAI use cases for cross-border marketing and ecommerce are really, really interesting.

GenAI Use Case 2: Chatbots as Advisors for Cross-Border B2B Ecommerce

This one is also really interesting.

Brands and merchants often look overseas when thinking about their next growth opportunity. They are comfortable in their home market but can see a limit to what they are doing. So, they look international. But don’t quite know which foreign market to target. Or what customer niche to focus on. Or how to win there.

AIDC has a chatbot for this situation. It’s a business advisor that provides intelligence and advice for international ecommerce. And that’s great because most SMEs do not have either expertise or an international head in this (I often get called to play this role). And they definitely don’t have the data to tell them what niche to focus on. But a chatbot drawing on Alibaba’s international ecommerce data does.

After working with the AI advisor, the merchant or brand can then start to work with Alibaba.com, which is built for B2B cross-border transactions. I’ve written about this business before.

• com’s Crazy Strategy for a Global E-Commerce Trading Platform (1 of 2) (Tech Strategy – Daily Strategy)

Alibaba.com specializes in B2B transactions, where you want to connect SMEs everywhere to SMEs everywhere. That means enabling small factories in Texas ordering custom parts from small factories in China, who might have ordered custom parts from small factories in the Philippines. And so on.

Alibaba.com specializes in making such transactions simple and convenient. Which requires:

• Information on buyers and sellers. Lots of reviews and feedback.
• That means verified identities. Verified business licenses.
• Which means holding in escrow.
• Logistics and delivery. Globally. Guaranteed.
• Customs and taxes paid. This can be complicated when dealing with lots of countries.
• Government filings and compliance. In hundreds of countries.
• Dispute resolution.

Alibaba.com is really good at all of this. But combining it with a GenAI cross-border advisor is a really good idea. And Alibaba does know a lot about what people are buying around the world. They have a unique data set to train such an AI advisor.

GenAI Use Case 3: Real Time Translation

This one is not sexy and was kind of covered in Use Case 1. But it is super important.

Translation is now happening in real time. DingTalk and other China apps are getting good at Chinese based translation. But large-scale language models have taken this to the next level. It’s now multi-modal. And real-time.

Alibaba’s Qwen Tingwu tool is good at real-time translation. It’s based on their large-scale language model for real-time multimedia content translation between Chinese and English. Multimodal means it can handle text, photos, video, audio, etc. We’re getting close to having a virtual personal translator with us at all times.

In cross-border ecommerce, this helps with sales and customer service (as discussed). But it can also be really helpful for internal communications. If you are doing ecommerce cross-border, you are probably going to have staff in each country handling customers service and other activities. And the more countries you add, the more internal communication is going to be a problem. You are going to have staff from different countries. With different levels of language. Real time translation in team meetings and internal communication is a big benefit. And it is already happening. And GenAI translators are getting smarter about the nature of your particular business.

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Ok. That’s it for today. I found that to be a helpful list of use cases. Going cross-border is a pretty good idea for a lot of businesses.

Cheers, Jeff

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

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