Kicking off on October 15th 2025, this year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival (11.11) marks a pivotal moment. Alibaba is embracing the event as its first large-scale deployment of generative AI in e-commerce, focusing on delivering tangible value for consumers and merchants.
One of this year’s key breakthroughs is how Taobao and Tmall have used AI to enrich and index the foundational layer of the e-commerce platforms: a product catalog of over two billion listings. Building on top of this, LLMs have been integrated to core search and recommendation engines. As a result, the search engine can now more comprehensively understand complex contexts in conversation-style queries. In recommendation scenarios, AI leads to more positive surprises in product discovery.
Post-trained on Alibaba’s Qwen large language models, this AI upgrade has led to significant uplift across a number of key metrics – including a double digit improvement in result relevance for complex queries and a double-digit lift in click-through for certain recommendation scenarios.
“Our integration of generative AI drove significant improvements on top of an already mature tech stack. We are confident that AI will deliver even greater value across Taobao and Tmall. This includes further gains on core search, recommendation, and advertising engines, empowering the merchants’ day-to-day operations and lowering costs, and exploring new AI native shopping experiences. This year marks the first of many future 11.11s with generative AI deployment at scale,” said Kaifu Zhang, Vice President of Alibaba Group, who heads search, recommendation, and AI innovations at Alibaba’s e-commerce businesses.
Alibaba is transforming its businesses with AI, a strategy backed by its planned US$53 billion investment in AI infrastructure announced in February 2025. While many in the global tech sector are exploring returns on AI investments, Alibaba is seeing early results across its core commerce businesses.
AI Drives E-Commerce Efficiency
AI deployment on Taobao and Tmall this year begins with adding contextual information and indexing to its two billion product listings – from trending seasonal styles to practical uses for household gadgets. This integration is the foundation for improved search and recommendation, resulting in significantly improved matching precision between products and consumer preferences.
For consumers, the impact is clear. AI-powered recommendations are delivering more relevant and compelling product suggestions in feeds, driving a double-digit uplift in clicks. In search, AI has improved the relevance of results for consumers’ complex queries by 20 percentage points, while also providing contextual recommendations, summarizing reviews, and finding relevant coupons.
On the merchant side, built-in AI capabilities identify marketing opportunities, helping sellers to reach potential consumers more efficiently. The results are powerful: for example, an AI-powered bidding engine drives up marketing ROI by 12%.
An “AI Team” for Millions of Merchants
For the tens of millions of businesses on Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba has upgraded its AI toolkit, creating a virtual “AI team” to help them navigate the busiest season of the year with greater efficiency and cost savings.
AIGC Suite Upgraded with Video Generation
The upgraded AI-Generated Content (AIGC) suite helps merchants create marketing materials at scale and now includes a new video generation feature. The tool can produce vivid videos from just a few static product photos. Collectively, the AIGC suite generates approximately 200 million images and 5 million videos monthly, driving an over 10% increase in product click-through rates.
Proactive Business Insights and Customer Service
The AI Business Advisor has evolved from a simple reporting dashboard into a proactive analyst. It generates tailored business recommendations—from dynamic pricing to optimized inventory plans—allowing merchants to act faster. The feature has generated ten million analytical reports for merchants.
The AI-powered customer service assistant “Dianxiaomi” was also upgraded in September 2025, helping merchants save RMB20 million in daily operation costs.
A Smarter Journey for a Billion Shoppers
AI is streamlining the consumer journey on Taobao and Tmall with a set of intelligent tools for a more intuitive shopping experience.
For its more than 53 million 88VIP members, the platform is deploying AI to optimize coupon distributions, better serving this key consumer cohort.
From AI Search Bar to Smart Personal Shopper
Shoppers can now move beyond simple keywords with conversational search, asking highly specific questions, like “my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter does not like to brush her teeth. What should I buy?”
An AI Personal Shopping Assistant embedded in the search results and individual product pages acts like a real-life personal shopper, helping customers compare items and find the best deals. For 11.11, the assistant also features dedicated “AI wish lists” that provide personalized shopping lists and help consumers navigate the best deals during the festival seamlessly.
Additionally, Taobao and Tmall’s multi-modal search feature, “Snap and shop”, allows consumers to snap a photo and instantly get tiered recommendations by price and quality, helping them make more informed decisions. The AI can intelligently understand and extract text from images—and search using visual and textual cues simultaneously, returning accurate results. A practical use case is helping elderly people understand over-the-counter medicine information on packaging and search for similar products.
AI-Re-imagined Virtual Try-on
Virtual try-on technology has received a major AI upgrade, addressing the often-clunky experiences of the past. From just a single photo – with no special lighting, pose, or setting required – the system creates a lifelike digital avatar of the consumer with greater consistency. Powered by AI, the system then dresses the avatar with industry-leading remarkable realism, accurately reproducing fabric textures, color gradients, and the natural way materials fold, stretch, and drape.
AI Reimagines E-Commerce
This year’s 11.11 is more than a shopping festival; it is a massive, practical implementation of how AI can be woven into the fabric of e-commerce. By focusing on practical applications that create tangible value, Alibaba demonstrates a future where shopping is more intuitive for consumers and selling is more efficient for businesses of all sizes.
