AI Agents and the Future of Global Trade with Alibaba’s Kuo Zhang - Ep. 291

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Since 1999, alibaba.com has served business to business ecommerce buyers and suppliers from over 200 countries and regions around the world. Kuo Zhang, president of alibaba.com, is here with us today to talk about how AI agents like Alibaba's recently launched, Accio, will be reshaping our massive global trade ecosystem over the next decade. And while we've talked a lot about agents in recent episodes of the podcast, there are few people in the world who have Kuo's perspective on how technology shapes global commerce, which is why I'm so excited to welcome him onto the podcast. Kuo, thanks so much for taking the time out to join NVIDIA's AI podcast. Thank you for having me. And, I know you're joining us while you're traveling, so an extra special thanks. Appreciate you making it work. So let's get right into it. Maybe we can set the stage or you can set the stage. Tell the audience a bit about what Alibaba does and alibaba.com in particular, and then you can talk a little about your role as president of alibaba.com. Okay. So alibaba.com is the first business of Alibaba Group. It is founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and the Alien founders. So it started as a yellow page, and now it's kind of evolving to a leading b to b platform in the world. It connecting around 50,000,000 buyers, b to b buyers in yearly basis and more than 200,000 suppliers globally. And it's now enabling more than $660,000,000,000 US dollars transaction in yearly basis. So this is about alibaba..com today. And, I, actually, I joined Alibaba since 2011. So my first role is, in Powerball and Tmall. It's, kind of in China domestic b two c business. And I joined alibaba.com since 2017 and then become the president about five years ago. So, yeah, this is quite a journey. Yes. I can only imagine how I mean, maybe I don't know if you can speak to this in in a short amount of time, but I can only imagine how technology and from your perspective has changed so much, you know, on the inside, on the buyer and supplier side, and and, of course, what Alibaba has done and is doing building platforms. Because as a consumer, the way that, you know, I purchase things way down at the end of the chain has changed so much. And so I can only imagine from your perspective and the work that you've done and continue to do now just really how how things have transformed. Right. So what you say is is, crack. I want to echo that. It's one of our dream is to make global trade as easy as online shopping. Yeah. Just think about how we kind of, reshape about the ecommerce. So the people buying stuff is really easy. And now when the buyers want to source or want to buy something …