Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched an AI-powered search engine dubbed Accio to help small businesses in Europe and the Americas source supplies.

Kuo Zhang, President of Alibaba.com and Vice President VP of Alibaba International, stated that initial tests of the AI-driven search engine revealed that businesses’ purchase intent after using the new tool increased by 40% versus traditional search engines.

Notably, Accio uses data from 50 million businesses on Alibaba International’s platform and publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He added that the tool incorporates 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries across more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company’s business-to-business platform, which sells to companies outside China.

The platform uses generative AI tech from Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model. The initial version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, according to the company.