{"id":146526,"date":"2026-08-20T19:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T19:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/146526\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T19:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T19:28:09","slug":"aiibaba-focuses-on-agentic-commerce-as-ai-spending-balloons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/146526\/","title":{"rendered":"AIibaba Focuses on Agentic Commerce as AI Spending Balloons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alibaba<\/a> is focusing on agentic commerce innovations as it spends heavily on artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

The Chinese tech giant shared quarterly earnings<\/a> results Thursday (Aug. 20) that showed revenue up 9% for the year, while its AI investments drove a 75% decline in net income.<\/p>\n

External revenue from Alibaba\u2019s cloud business was up 45%, while AI-related product revenue saw triple-digit growth for the 12th quarter in a row, CEO Eddie Wu<\/a> said in the company\u2019s earnings press release.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith our full-stack AI strategy, we have put Alibaba in a superior position to capture the substantial growth of demand for artificial intelligence and AI compute,\u201d Wu said in the release.<\/p>\n

Alibaba\u2019s capital expenditures, which include its AI infrastructure investments, surged 75% to 67.7 billion yuan (about $10 billion).<\/p>\n

During an earnings call, the company, which has its roots in eCommerce<\/a> but has become increasingly focused on AI, discussed how proprietary technology is beginning to transform shopping habits and merchant operations.<\/p>\n

A key pillar of the shift is the deployment of AI directly into the retail ecosystem. So far, 250 million users have completed their first AI-driven shopping<\/a> experience using the company\u2019s flagship Qwen<\/a> model, Wu said.<\/p>\n

The company sees \u201csignificant opportunities for AI\u201d on both the supply and demand sides of eCommerce, Wu said during the call. On the consumer side, that means launching \u201cnew experiences and scenarios\u201d powered by AI, like multimodal search and virtual try-ons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal is twofold,\u201d Wu said. \u201cFirst, to use AI technology to enhance the experience and efficiency of existing shopping scenarios. And we\u2019ve already observed that AI has driven significant efficiency gains in our product recommendations. And secondly, to drive new kinds of AI-driven interactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the supply side, Alibaba has seen that merchants are already \u201cwidely adopting\u201d AI into their operations, Wu said during the call. The company is exploring ways to use the technology \u201cacross various operational links\u201d to improve merchant capabilities, especially in data analytics, advertising and marketing, and customer service \u201cwhere merchants can derive clear benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd going forward, we\u2019ll also collaborate with Qwen Office to launch AI agents<\/a> that are specifically tailored for eCommerce scenarios,\u201d Wu said.<\/p>\n

Speaking more broadly about the company\u2019s AI efforts, Wu said Alibaba\u2019s investment model is \u201cfundamentally different from that of pure-play AI companies,\u201d as its strategy involves chips, cloud infrastructure and AI models.<\/p>\n

The earnings results came days after a report that Alibaba\u2019s open-weight models<\/a> had become the top AI offerings in the world. The company\u2019s models have seen more than 3 billion downloads worldwide in the last six months, more than those from Google<\/a>, Meta<\/a> and Alibaba\u2019s domestic rivals like DeepSeek<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alibaba is focusing on agentic commerce innovations as it spends heavily on artificial intelligence. The Chinese tech giant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,7493,2477,25,3775,1732,66,310,1379,311],"class_list":["post-146526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-agentic-ai","tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","tag-alibaba","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-earnings","tag-ecommerce","tag-news","tag-pymnts-news","tag-retail","tag-whats-hot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}