The news: Alibaba integrated its Qwen AI assistant into its ecommerce platforms, marking the next stage in its efforts to embed agentic commerce across its ecosystem.

• Taobao’s and Tmall’s entire inventory of over 4 billion products is now discoverable and shoppable via the Qwen app.
• Taobao also debuted an AI shopping assistant, powered by Qwen, that can answer shoppers’ questions and deliver recommendations alongside features such as virtual try-on and price tracking.

Why it matters: The rollout extends agentic commerce across Alibaba’s vast ecosystem, from ecommerce to food delivery to travel bookings and more, putting the company in a prime position to benefit from Chinese consumers’ growing use of AI.

While Alibaba’s Qwen assistant trails ByteDance’s Doubao, DeepSeek, and Tencent’s Yuanbao in usage, it is already seeing strong traction in commerce. In just one week in February, the company’s AI Pay service, which enables AI agents to complete purchases on users’ behalf, exceeded 120 million transactions. Alibaba's reach across verticals and extensive payments and commerce infrastructure mean that the company is better equipped than most competitors to execute—and win customer buy-in for—its end-to-end agentic commerce capabilities.

Implications for the retail industry: Agentic commerce in China is proceeding on a different track than in the US, where lack of trust, fragmentation, and technical limitations are hampering adoption. Unlike their US counterparts, Chinese consumers are largely trusting of AI, with 54% embracing the technology (compared with just 17% in the US), per an October Edelman survey. That could enable Alibaba, Meituan, and others to avoid some of the adoption pains faced by OpenAI and Perplexity.

Should end-to-end agentic commerce continue to gain traction, we expect a slight lift in China’s ecommerce sales into 2030. But growing reliance on AI agents for purchases could make it even harder for brands and retailers to stay visible in China’s highly competitive retail landscape, forcing companies to restructure everything from marketing to product pages to maximize their chances of getting in front of consumers.

Go further: Check out 4 Charts on Alibaba and AI Commerce in China.