Currently, China’s small and medium-sized enterprises are accelerating from “product overseas” to a new stage of “brand overseas”.
In the past few years, a group of small and medium-sized enterprises that have grown up in the intense domestic market competition and e-commerce platform ecosystem have built significant international competitive advantages by virtue of their solid manufacturing capabilities and efficient supply chain systems.
To truly establish brand influence in the global market, more cutting-edge technological means are needed to empower and upgrade.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is reshaping the ecological landscape of e-commerce with disruptive power and penetrating the entire e-commerce chain – from front-end intelligent product selection, accurate user profiling, and personalized recommendation algorithm optimization, to cross-border e-commerce’s multi-language intelligent customer service, cross-currency real-time settlement, to back-end supply chain intelligent forecasting, dynamic inventory allocation, and logistics path optimization. AI is being upgraded to become the core engine driving the high-quality development of the e-commerce industry.
On April 16, the Institute of International Trade and Economic Cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce hosted a symposium on AI empowering the high-quality development of e-commerce in Beijing. Experts and scholars from the fields of artificial intelligence and e-commerce, as well as representatives from the business community and government, discussed topics such as accelerating the application of AI agents in e-commerce scenarios, breaking the development bottleneck of the e-commerce industry, and reconstructing the talent training system in the e-commerce field.
Wang Xuekun, Dean of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce and Secretary of the Party Committee, pointed out that the breakthrough development of artificial intelligence technology is profoundly reshaping the entire link of cross-border e-commerce, including product selection, operation, supply chain and even talent training.
How to seize the strategic opportunities brought by AI, transform technological advantages into quality advantages and competitive advantages, and promote cross-border e-commerce from scale expansion to a new stage of quality improvement are issues that must be solved in the current industry.
Tian Feng, director of Think Fast and Slow Thinking Research Institute, shared the top ten trends in AI changing e-commerce.
He said that the marketing paradigm of e-commerce is undergoing profound changes.
AI is gradually upgrading from an auxiliary “tool” to an “infrastructure” driving the development of e-commerce.
In future business scenarios, deal matching and procurement decisions will be completed independently and collaboratively by AI, and full-process management such as customer service response, daily operations, sales returns, and exchanges will also be fully AI-based.
At the meeting, many guests shared their views on the role of social media in brand overseas expansion and market decision-making.
Song Yaoming, vice president of the National Japanese Economic Association and former economic and commercial minister of the Chinese Embassy in Japan, believes that using AI to integrate multi-dimensional data such as global social media trends, user word-of-mouth feedback and consumption habits in various regions can accurately predict market demand and effectively reduce the risk of product selection decisions.
The global communication landscape is gradually evolving from traditional media and search e-commerce to content social platforms.
Pei Zhusi, founder of Wuzite Technology, pointed out that in this context, brand competition has upgraded to a systematic competition centered on people, scenes, content and distribution.
From leveraging supply chain advantages to realizing brand overseas, AI is becoming an important support for Chinese companies to cross the new track of content and social media and break through growth bottlenecks.
In a sense, Chinese brands are also constantly exploring operational strategies that adapt to the recommendation mechanism of content social platforms in order to obtain more stable and predictable traffic growth.
Relying on GrowClaw, the latest AI intelligent agent developed by Wuzi Technology, an in-depth market insight report that used to take five people a week to complete can now be generated by a single person in just a few hours, with higher accuracy.
The guests said during the exchange that with the help of this capability, small and medium-sized enterprises can also have exclusive “AI marketing growth experts”, and by opening up the entire link of market insight, strategy formulation, content creation, launch execution and effect feedback, it can help enterprises upgrade the originally decentralized and highly dependent on manual experience marketing process into a sustainable and iteratively optimized intelligent growth system.
Talent training is also critical.
Zhou Linwei, Secretary of the Party Committee of Baoding University, said that in the future, the development and application of AI must be truly integrated into the industrial system.
There is an urgent need for a group of compound talents who are both proficient in AI technology and deeply involved in industrial practice. They will play an important role in promoting the development of e-commerce in the AI era.
Du Guochen, director of the E-commerce Institute of the Ministry of Commerce Research Institute, concluded that the impact of AI on cross-border e-commerce is no longer limited to the technical level, but is now fully extending to industrial practice, education systems and companies’ overseas routes. In some areas, the underlying logic has even been reconstructed.
In the next step, artificial intelligence will not only serve talent training, but also truly empower small and medium-sized enterprises and small and medium-sized brands to go global, helping them improve efficiency, lower barriers to entry, and enhance competitiveness.
