The setup around the center of Alibaba’s booth showcased how the embedded chatbot can help buyers navigate the sourcing website.
Alibaba.com, an international business-to-business wholesale marketplace of South China Morning Post owner Alibaba, launched its Smart Assistant feature at the CES 2024 in Las Vegas, with computers set up around the center of its booth to show how the embedded chatbot can help buyers navigate the sourcing website.
Chris Lu, general manager at Alibaba.com North America, said, “With advances in AI, we are ushering in the next generation of sourcing and empowering small businesses to succeed with our Smart Assistant at their side,”
Smart Assistant is powered by multiple large language models (LLMs) – the technology used to train ChatGPT and similar services – including home-grown Tongyi Qianwen, depending on the use case, an Alibaba.com representative said.
Alibaba.com’s debut of Smart Assistant showed how ubiquitous AI innovation was at CES this year. No tech giant’s exhibition was complete without showing off its effort in that space.
By putting generative AI at the center of its exhibition, Alibaba.com made it clear where it thought the platform’s advantage lies, despite some grumblings from a marketing manager that the product was not quite yet ready for prime time, according to a brand ambassador at the booth. A number of CES attendees at the Alibaba.com presentation were made up of select “gold suppliers”, or those that pay for a premium membership on the platform, according to some exhibitors.
