阿里巴巴在洛杉矶 CoCreate 大会披露电商 AI 智能体 Accio 上线五个月获逾 6 万付费用户、年化收入超 6000 万美元，并自发布基准称其成本仅为 OpenAI/Anthropic 同类代理的约四成

LOS ANGELES -- Alibaba says its AI agent for e-commerce has brought in more than 60,000 paid users over the five months since its launch and is substantially more cost-efficient than general agents from OpenAI and Anthropic when it comes to carrying out online commerce-related tasks.
Alibaba.com, the business-to-business arm of Alibaba Group Holding, kicked off its annual CoCreate conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. More than 10,000 American buyers -- mostly representatives from small and midsize enterprises -- flocked to the cross-border trade event, nearly tripling the number of attendees from last year. The wholesale platform has more than 8 million users in America, its biggest buyer market.
The Accio AI agent platform, officially launched in April, is designed to help SMEs with e-commerce tasks ranging from product design and launch to sourcing and tax compliance.
Zhang Kuo, president of Alibaba.com, told Nikkei Asia in an interview on Tuesday that Accio has attracted more than 60,000 paid users in just five months. With each user on average spending over $1,000 on the AI service, this translates to more than $60 million in annual recurring revenue, he added.
"Affordability is key to attract small and medium business users because they don't have the resources to splurge on tokens," Zhang said. Tokens are units of data that AI models process during training or deployment, and form a basis for pricing AI model usage.
At the event's keynote speech on Wednesday morning, Zhang unveiled Commerce Agent Bench, a benchmark designed to analyze which AI models and agents work best for e-commerce tasks such as finding suppliers or booking complicated shipping routes.
Putting different AI agents to the test using the 107 most common tasks in e-commerce scenarios, Alibaba found it cost just $3.69 worth of tokens to complete all the tasks with the Accio agent, while it cost $9.27 using OpenAI's Codex and $9.51 using Anthropic's Claude Code.
According to Zhang, the Accio agent will automatically find the most cost-effective AI models for users, adding that "we fine-tuned some models to improve their performance in e-commerce tasks."
When asked if the benchmark was designed to favor Alibaba's models and agents, Zhang said it is fully open-sourced and can be tested by anyone.
"We especially welcome leading AI labs to test our benchmark, so together we can make AI more useful for e-commerce," he said.
Alibaba will directly face off against Anthropic in the U.S. market, as the American AI leader launched its Claude Commerce Agent in early September, with the aim of building agents for both shoppers and merchants.
Zhang said he expects Alibaba to stand out from its competitors due to its decades of experience in the e-commerce industry and its ability to make AI tools more affordable.
"E-commerce is a highly competitive business and margins are getting lower and lower. That's why the affordability of AI tools is very important," Zhang said. "Your agent may be able to complete the task once perfectly in a lab setting, but what if you need to complete the tasks thousands of times every day? Then it has to be affordable."
Zhang added that the complexity of trade and commerce has also made it more difficult to deploy AI in e-commerce settings than in areas such as coding.
Because Alibaba began working in global e-commerce in 1999, "we know where the pain points are and we have the industry know-how to solve them," the executive said.
Despite rising tariffs and geopolitical uncertainties, revenue from Alibaba's global wholesale operations -- which include Alibaba.com -- grew 7% on the year to $2.1 billion during the three months through June.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to visit the White House on Sept. 24 to discuss a wide range of issues, including tariffs and AI.
"While there are trade barriers, our business continues to grow because there are more small and medium-sized businesses participating in global trade driven by technologies such as AI," Zhang said.