This Double 11, 5 million merchants have already gotten used to using AI.
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Author | Huang Yu
Editor | Wang Xiaojuan
Nearly two years after Alibaba made “AI-driven” its core strategy, the era of AI-powered e-commerce that Jack Ma spoke of is accelerating. Many merchants have already reaped the benefits of this year’s Double 11, the first time AI has been fully implemented across Tmall.
The head of Tmall business at Robam Appliances revealed that this Double 11, almost the entire Tmall team was using the AI Business Manager, which provided a lot of help in daily business consultations, store inspections and analysis, customer support, and more. It helped the team save a lot of time and energy, and overall business analysis efficiency was at least doubled.
Wallstreetcn learned from Taotian that since the first day of Double 11 up to now, there are already 5 million merchants using AI tools provided by the Taobao and Tmall platforms in their day-to-day operations.
Reportedly, this Double 11, Taobao has fully upgraded “Business Manager,” its AI tool for merchants, providing a new AI assistant through a combination of one “AI Store Manager” and six “AI Employees” (AI Data Analyst, AI Marketing Operations, AI Audience Operations, AI Designer, AI Customer Service, AI Orders).
Of these, the AI Store Manager’s “Sales Promotion Assistant” provided merchants with real-time business insights, identified risks of customer attrition, and uncovered new opportunities at different stages. During the sales promotion, it generated five million business strategies for merchants, helping save, on average, 30% of the workload and boosting efficiency by 1.5 times.
Besides the AI business tools, the Taobao and Tmall platforms have also made further upgrades in AI marketing, linking more business actions together.
It is understood that this year, Alibaba’s big data marketing platform, Alimama, has fully upgraded its self-developed AI large model LMA2, and upgraded “Sitewide Promotion” to “Product Sitewide Push,” using AI to reshape the product marketing and business chain.
Hu Bao, General Manager of Alimama’s Brand Business, Market and Commercial Operations Center, pointed out that throughout the merchant promotion process, Alibaba extends AIGX (AI General Experience) into each link, including AIGI (Indexing), AIGT (Targeting), AIGB (Bidding), AIGA (Auction), AIGD (Data), and AIGC (Creativity).
With the improvement of AI’s foundational capabilities, it’s reported that during Tmall’s Double 11, “Product Sitewide Push” helped boost transaction growth of a million products by over 30%, sparking explosive growth.
Reportedly, on the first day of Double 11 sales, Midea’s official flagship store saw a direct sales increase of over 150% through Product Sitewide Push, with ROI delivery rates over 100%.
Furthermore, Alimama also used the one-stop, full-domain media marketing platform Uni Desk as an operations hub, helping merchants carry out cross-platform seeding during sales promotions to acquire new users for their brands; by connecting in-platform brand advertising, they efficiently link content-based seeding with e-commerce sales. Data shows that during Double 11, the conversion rate of external seeding to internal pursuit for brands reached as high as 70%.
Smart customer service has, since the rise of large language models, been recognized as one of the best real-world applications, and customer service Agents have become a main battlefield for AI capability upgrades during Double 11.
To handle the surge in inquiries during peak sales, Taotian’s smart customer service product “Dian Xiaomi” has continued to improve end-to-end efficiency this year. Pre-sale, it has upgraded user intent recognition, product comparison, and personalized recommendation abilities; in after-sales, it has deeply integrated with platform systems to achieve automation of core functions.
Data shows that during Tmall’s Double 11, AI customer service served a total of 300 million consumers, of which 100 million were handled purely automatically by AI.
Notably, general after-sales inquiries such as end-to-end shopping recommendations, product comparisons, and logistics tracking can all be automatically resolved by “Dian Xiaomi,” helping merchants improve conversion efficiency by 30%.
A 3C all-category store reflected that after upgrading to the Dian Xiaomi Agent, the overall rate of switching to manual customer service dropped below 30%, and satisfaction significantly improved. Configuration and maintenance of sales promotions shrank from several days to just a few hours.
Kai Feng, head of the Dian Xiaomi business at Taobao Tmall Customer Operations Department, said that Double 11 promotions bring the typical dilemma of surging inquiries and insufficient manpower. Merchants usually deal with this by hiring many customer service agents for training two weeks in advance to handle traffic that may double or more, but this often results in problems since the quality of customer service can’t be guaranteed.
“Now, with robots, stable 24/7 responses are possible. We can assign simple questions to robots, and have complex or high-value users prioritized for human handling. This way, we better solve the problems faced during major promotions,” Kai Feng said.
AI is tangibly making e-commerce operations more efficient, especially in this year’s Double 11, where AI was fully rolled out for the first time.
As Tmall President Jia Luo said, this year’s Double 11 is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Its core driver has shifted from sheer traffic and discounts to deep operational capabilities rooted in AI and long-term data insight.
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