Alibaba's Accio Work AI agents help Yiwu merchants trade 10x faster

Yiwu, China's 'world's supermarket' and the largest wholesale market for small commodities, is being revolutionized by AI agents. Merchants like Wei Jun closed a deal for 1,000 projector lamps in record time after an AI agent automatically beamed product specs to R&D and supply chain teams, bypassing manual back-and-forth. Li Shenghai now uses AI agents to analyze short-video trends and comment keywords, replacing hours of manual data collection. The biggest shift is for sole proprietors: Zhang Qianchao, a novice, built a one-person cross-border business using 8 AI agents on Alibaba's Accio Work platform. These agents handle market research, product design, and trade policy analysis — slashing a typical 2-3 week selection-and-design cycle to a single day. Within two months, Zhang sold over 3,000 customized baseball caps to Europe, the US, and Africa.

This transformation is not just about speed — it's democratizing global trade. AI turns business experience into an on-demand service, giving SMEs a 'business operating system' and lowering barriers for entrepreneurs. China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) explicitly supports AI integration with the real economy, including multimodal systems, AI agents, and embodied AI. Experts note that AI agents amplify China's supply chain advantages, allowing 'Made in China' products to reach global buyers with unprecedented efficiency. The result: Yiwu's export value already leads all county-level regions nationwide, and AI is accelerating that lead.