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For many SMEs and founders, time is the biggest growth barrier. They frequently find themselves juggling multiple roles and responsibilities, from product development and supplier management to sales, marketing and finance operations.
But, as the cost of doing business grows and SMEs are pushed to keep resources to a minimum, they do not have the capacity to run, let alone optimise, their operations.
This is where agentic AI comes in.
Rather than simply acting as a chatbot which typically focus on drafting, suggesting or providing answers to specific prompts, agentic AI acts as an autonomous agent, completing tasks on behalf of business owners without instruction. In this way, it can carry out research, compare options, coordinate workflows and execute actions with minimal human input.
From chatbot to team player
One example is Accio Work, Alibaba.com’s 24/7 agentic business team that helps SMEs automate end-to-end business tasks, moving beyond advice to execute work across research, sourcing, negotiation, marketing, sales, operations and CRM.
Accio Work is designed to take a goal or business objective and create a specific action plan to deliver results. Its agents work in coordination with one another, providing SMEs with automated workflows rather than a series of isolated tasks.
Users get access to a pre-configured team of AI agents without requiring technical setup, allowing them to set goals in natural language, while the system assembles specialist agents to work on the task autonomously.
These agents can support businesses across the entire lifecycle, including product strategy and design, product and supplier search, comparison and vetting, enquiry and negotiation, store operations, marketing and sales.
Easing the sourcing bottleneck
Sourcing is often cited as one of the most time-consuming workflows for small businesses. To this end, business owners are forced to stick to the same suppliers even when more competitive products, pricing or terms may be available elsewhere.
Accio Work’s Sourcing Toolkit offers senior-level sourcing expertise to any growing SME or solopreneur. This toolkit can automate key sourcing tasks, including supplier identification, product and supplier comparisons, and bulk outreach 24/7, enabling founders to focus on other tasks.
A business owner can describe the product they want to create or upload specifications, and the platform identifies suitable suppliers, compares available options and prepares information for review.
Keeping supplier conversations moving
But the sourcing process rarely ends once suppliers have been identified. Negotiating with suppliers can be time intensive, especially when successful negotiation relies on understanding the market, shopping around, finding suppliers outside your region and being prepared to walk away if you feel you aren’t making progress.
The Sourcing Toolkit equips business owners with vital intelligence and helps businesses enter negotiations from a much stronger starting position and to make decisions based on robust evidence.
Bringing ideas to market faster
Finally, the Sourcing Toolkit helps SMEs identify products with strong commercial potential, enabling SMEs to capitalise on new and emerging trends with greater agility and reduce the time to market.
The result is a faster route from idea conception to execution which is particularly valuable in markets where consumer trends change rapidly and speed to market determines success.
Accio Work is plug-and-play, with zero set-up, no configuration and no code. It is built for real business scenarios, with enterprise-grade security, sandboxed environments, granular permissions and user approval for sensitive actions.
For founders who want to do more than just source their ideas but also bring them onto the international stage, Alibaba.com has expanded its CoCreate Pitch competition, becoming a fully AI-powered product innovation programme.
Taking place in London between 19-20 November 2026, participants are invited to apply directly through Accio Work, where a dedicated CoCreate Pitch Agent helps transform early-stage product ideas into investor-ready pitch concepts.
The competition offers a prize pool exceeding US$1 million and gives entrepreneurs the chance to showcase new products on an international stage.
Find out more about Alibaba.com’s CoCreate Pitch Competition 2026.
This is sponsored content by Alibaba.com
