With the rapid development of AI, cross-border e-commerce services are undergoing profound changes.
First came OpenClaw, then Hermes Agent. Entering 2026, Agent products have become the focus of the global AI industry, and it is increasingly possible for AI Agents to enter real business processes.
At the same time, Anthropic continues to steal the market from traditional service providers with its high-frequency update rhythm. The saying “SaaS is dead” is rampant, and the cross-border e-commerce field has also been affected by this change.
In the cross-border e-commerce service system, the first to be transformed are those links that are highly dependent on repeated labor, standard processes and simple manpower.
Take product selection as an example. In the past, sellers needed operators to periodically manually organize data for analysis and judgment. Now AI has transformed the workflow. Sellers can directly call the interface to obtain keyword data, clean the data through fixed processes, and generate structured conclusions from the model.
The compliance field has also changed with the support of AI.
Various cross-border e-commerce platforms and national markets have put forward higher requirements for compliance operations. In the past, compliance judgments relied on experienced personnel, which caused problems such as high costs, long cycles, and uncertain results.
Ruiguan AI can help sellers implement risk pre-screening before new products are launched to continuous monitoring of products on sale. In the future, it can also perform large-scale data processing and automated decision-making.
The customs declaration link in the traditional foreign trade process has also been impacted by AI.
The traditional customs declaration system relies on manual labor, has complicated processes, and has high single-ticket prices.
Cross-border customs AI service provider “Wheat Cloud AI” has standardized the customs declaration process. After sellers upload basic shipping information, the system can complete identification and processing in a short time, significantly reducing single-ticket customs declaration fees.
AI’s ability to optimize labor costs is the first to empower small and medium-sized enterprises.
For example, Lightyear Touch’s sales agent can help small and medium-sized enterprises quickly find matching overseas customers, and Chopsticks Technology can help small and medium-sized enterprises in subdivided industries stably produce content, with a considerable hit rate.
However, there are also parts that are difficult to completely replace AI in the actual operation of cross-border e-commerce.
Product selection decisions are highly personalized. At present, AI product selection mostly remains in the “screening” stage, and real decision-making still relies on the company’s internal judgment model.
At the enterprise-level execution level, stability and controllability are the threshold. There is uncertainty in the execution of current intelligent product products, and RPA + AI has become a relatively mature solution.
The ability to execute strategies and overall planning is also difficult to replace in a short period of time. For example, in the page design of Shopify’s independent website, although AI can generate modules, it is difficult to replace professional organizations in the overall structural design.
In the future, the implementation of AI in the e-commerce field will become more mature, and links such as data insight and creative generation will gradually be compressed into a unified system.
The moat of cross-border e-commerce service providers is also changing. The accumulation of data layer, accumulation of business experience and the degree of fit with merchants’ business constitute barriers to survival.
The future era will move towards A2A, and service providers need to develop agent-oriented capabilities. Although a large number of intermediate service links will be eliminated in the A2A era, it will also bring new opportunities to service providers, such as the development of customized agent services.
