9amBusiness recently attended Alibaba’s inaugural CoCreate Europe event in London, where hundreds of people gathered to hear more about its future plans and how it is supporting the companies in its eco-system.
In a keynote address Alibaba President Kuo Zhang announced the launch of ‘AI Mode’ – a new feature which integrates agentic AI capabilities directly into the user journey.
He said the launch marks a new direction for AI-driven global trade and a pivotal moment in the company’s evolution into an agentic AI-powered e-commerce platform.
Kuo also said that European order volume have surged 57% year-on-year, while the number of active suppliers worldwide has grown by 50% compared to the same period last year.
He said that AI Mode is set to roll out this December and represents a reimagining of how businesses discover, evaluate, and engage with suppliers in the $30 trillion B2B market.
At the event, 15–year–old Harrison Nott also walked away as the Grand Winner of CoCreate Pitch –a product-driven start-up competition – for his innovative small business, CoolTowel™.
In recognition of his pioneering product idea, Harrison received a prize package of $200,000 to help further develop and scale his CoolTowel™ product.
CoCreate Pitch saw 30 finalists shortlisted from thousands of SMEs from across Europe and globally pitch to a star-studded panel of judges. Each completed a 90-second presentation, vying for the honour to be recognised the creator of Europe’s most innovative product.
During the day, Oli Ballard from 9amBusiness also had the opportunity to talk to Kuo Zhang and here is the short interview.
This is the first time Alibaba has held a European conference. Can you tell us more about why now and your plans for the region?
The UK and Europe is always a key priority for us and the number of suppliers in the region using Alibaba in the last year has grown by around 50 per cent. Four years ago, we also committed to recruiting ten thousand new suppliers in Europe and we have achieved fifteen thousand.
This gives you an indication of the growth we’re seeing in the UK and Europe, and our plans are to continue to invest here.
Considering Brexit, why did you decided to hold the conference in the UK?
London is a great city, and the UK is a great place to do business. We also considered the event from an audience perspective, and the UK has a top buying and supplier market, so to run an offline event we needed to ensure footfall. English as a language is also a consideration, as was the media connections and general conditions for business in the country.
Next year, we will also consider Germany and Italy as a destination.
Did you have any interactions with the UK government about the conference being held here?
No, we didn’t. We are focused on suppliers and of course our buyers and in every decision we make we always think about who will benefit from our global supply chain the most.
The founding principle of Jack Ma (Alibaba founder) was to make it as easy as possible for those that interact with us, to do business. So, we understand the importance politics plays but we are business first and we want to do everything we can for our customers.
AI is a big theme for the event – what will it mean for job creation both for your eco-system and for Alibaba?
There are two big themes, when it comes to AI which are – will it destroy jobs for humans and will it overheat? Regarding jobs, in our eco-system many of our suppliers are small companies and AI is helping them with sourcing materials, making payments and other processes.
For Alibaba, we are not looking to replace people with AI, but we are asking our employees how it can help to make them work more efficiently. For example, in our engineering department we have historically set ourselves a challenge of having 300 ideas every quarter and implementing 100 of these as projects. AI is now allowing us to turn 130 out of the 300 ideas into projects, so we are not reducing our engineering team but looking to accomplish more because of AI.
It is the same for our sales team. AI is helping them by removing much of the repetitive work they do, so they can focus on people and researching and understanding customers better.