This Double 11, 5 million merchants have become accustomed to using AI

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Wang Xiaojuan

After Alibaba has made "AI-driven" its core strategy for nearly two years, the AI e-commerce era mentioned by Jack Ma is accelerating, and many merchants have already tasted the benefits during this year's Tmall Double 11, the first full implementation of AI.

The person in charge of Boss Electric's Tmall business revealed that this year's Double 11, the entire Tmall team at Boss Electric has been using the AI business manager, which has provided significant assistance in daily operational inquiries, store inspections and analysis, customer service Q&A, and more, saving the team a lot of time and effort, with overall operational analysis efficiency improved by at least 2 times.

According to Wall Street Insights from Tmall, as of the first day of Double 11, the number of merchants using the AI tools provided by the Taobao Tmall platform in daily operations has reached 5 million.

It is reported that this year's Double 11, Taobao has fully upgraded the "Business Manager," an AI tool for merchants, providing a new AI-assisted experience through a combination of 1 "AI Store Manager" and 6 "AI Employees" (AI Data Analyst, AI Marketing Operations, AI Audience Operations, AI Graphic Design, AI Customer Service, AI Order).

Among them, the AI Store Manager "Promotion Assistant" provides real-time operational interpretation, diagnoses operational loss risks, and identifies new opportunities for merchants at different stages. During the promotion period, it has generated 5 million promotional operational strategies for merchants, helping to save an average of 30% of workload and improving efficiency by 1.5 times.

In addition to AI operational tools, there have also been further upgrades in AI marketing on the Taobao Tmall platform, linking more operational actions.

It is understood that this year, Alibaba's big data marketing platform, Alimama, has upgraded its self-developed AI model LMA2 and transformed "Site-wide Promotion" into "Product Site-wide Promotion," reshaping the product marketing operational chain through AI.

Hu Bao, General Manager of Brand Business at Alimama's Marketing Department and Commercial Operations Center, pointed out that during the merchant advertising process, Alibaba extends AIGX in every aspect, including AIGI (Index), AIGT (Targeting), AIGB (Bidding), AIGA (Auction), AIGD (Data), and AIGC (Creative).

With the enhancement of AI's underlying capabilities, it is reported that during Tmall's Double 11, "Product Site-wide Promotion" helped achieve over 30% growth in transactions for millions of products, resulting in explosive growth.

It is reported that Midea's official flagship store saw a direct transaction increase of over 150% on the first day of the Double 11 sale, with an ROI delivery rate exceeding 100%.

Additionally, Alimama has also established a one-stop comprehensive media marketing platform—Uni Desk as an operational hub, assisting merchants in achieving brand-wide customer acquisition through external promotions during the promotion period; linking internal brand advertising efficiently connects content promotion and e-commerce sales. Data shows that during Double 11, the external promotion to internal pursuit rate for brands reached as high as 70% Intelligent customer service has become the best landing scenario for large AI language models since the rise of AI, and customer service agents have become the main battlefield for AI capability upgrades during the Double 11 shopping festival.

According to reports, to cope with the consulting pressure during peak promotional periods, this year, Taotian's intelligent customer service product "Dianxiaomi" has continuously improved efficiency across the entire chain. It has upgraded capabilities such as user intent recognition, product comparison, and personalized recommendations before sales, while after-sales has deeply integrated with platform systems to achieve automated processing of core functions.

Data shows that during the Tmall Double 11 period, AI customer service served a total of 300 million consumers, with AI fully automating the service for 100 million consumers.

It is worth mentioning that general after-sales issues such as full-chain selection recommendations, product comparisons, and logistics tracking can all be automatically resolved by "Dianxiaomi," helping merchants increase conversion efficiency by 30%.

A 3C all-category store reported that after upgrading to use the Dianxiaomi agent, the overall manual intervention rate of the store dropped to below 30%, and customer satisfaction significantly improved. The configuration maintenance for activities during the promotional period was shortened from several days to just a few hours.

Kai Feng, the person in charge of the Dianxiaomi business at the Taobao Tmall Customer Operations Department, stated that during the Double 11 promotion, customer service faces the typical dilemma of a surge in inquiries and insufficient manpower. Merchants usually respond by hiring many customer service representatives two weeks in advance for training to cope with a sudden increase in traffic, which can double or even more, leading to many issues as the quality of customer service cannot be guaranteed.

"Now, with robots, we can achieve stable responses 24/7. We can assign simple questions to robots, while complex or high-value user inquiries can be prioritized for resolution by human agents. Overall, through this approach, we can better address the challenges faced during the promotional period," Kai Feng said.

AI is genuinely improving the operational efficiency of e-commerce, especially during this year's Tmall Double 11, where AI has fully landed for the first time.

As Tmall President Jia Luo stated, this year's Double 11 is undergoing a fundamental transformation, with its core driving force shifting from mere traffic and discounts to deep operational capabilities based on AI and long-term data insights