How AI Agents Are Revolutionizing E‑Commerce and Global Brand Expansion

We are in an era where AI technology profoundly reshapes business rules. Enterprises face a crossroads: is an AI Agent merely an efficiency tool or a disruptive revolution essential for survival? In China’s consumer retail sector, the industry has entered the 3.0 era but suffers from rising traffic costs, difficulty in precise user profiling, and low repeat purchase rates. Meanwhile, Chinese brands expanding overseas encounter obstacles such as high market entry costs, insufficient localization capabilities, and lack of international brand‑building experience.

The round‑table "Baidu Intelligent Cloud‑2025 Intelligent Marketing China Tour·Hangzhou" gathered industry leaders to discuss the topic "How AI Agents Reshape E‑Commerce Retail and the New Ecosystem for Chinese Brands Going Global".

Panelists agreed that AI Agents have evolved from optional tools to a mandatory component of enterprise intelligence. In e‑commerce, AI Agents can generate content, provide intelligent customer service, and support private‑domain operations, effectively boosting repeat purchase rates and operational efficiency. For overseas expansion, AI Agents help solve multilingual, localization, and compliance challenges.

Topic 1: Upgrading User Experience – How AI Agents Break the Growth Bottleneck of Low Repurchase and Shallow Experience in E‑Commerce

Moderator Qiu Hua: The AI era is reshaping commercial rules. Is an AI Agent a quality‑improving assistant or a survival‑critical revolution? Retail has entered the 3.0 stage, but traffic costs rise, user insights are hard, and repurchase rates remain low. For Chinese brands going abroad, market entry and localization are difficult.

Wang Wenhui (Co‑President, Hangzhou Yaowang Network Technology): Three main issues hinder repurchase: lack of content innovation, missing experiential depth in live‑selling, and limited service personalization.

Cheng Hai (Vice President, Jingling Group): Private‑domain success depends on brand positioning as a cost or profit center. AI can automate user data tagging, emotional interaction, and handle over 90% of pre‑sale customer service, freeing teams to focus on acquisition and after‑sale service.

Zhang Hongguang (Vice‑President, Baidu Intelligent Cloud Marketing): Early breakthroughs are cost‑saving scenarios like intelligent客服, achieving over 50% cost reduction. AI also improves lead filtering and outbound calls, raising activation rates by 5% and accuracy by 40%.

Key recommendation: start with the most painful single scenario (e.g.,客服 or content generation), provide product documentation, and configure a digital employee within minutes. Expand gradually after positive pilot results.

Topic 2: Building a “Localization + Intelligence” Global Marketing Model for Chinese Brands

Shen Yang (AI Center Deputy GM & CTO, Focus Technology): Two hidden costs for overseas expansion are marketing & trial‑and‑error expenses and cross‑border warehousing capital pressure. AI agents can integrate public data for foresight analysis and optimize warehouse layout, reducing costs.

Wang Wenhui: Overseas traffic leans toward short‑video; live‑stream share is only ~10%. Chinese brands lack overseas brand awareness, but there is a huge pool of creators seeking Chinese supply chains. AI can build an efficient matchmaking platform to solve language,客服, and product‑matching issues.

Zhang Hongguang: Multilingual AI agents enable companies to generate multi‑language客服 and marketing content from a single Chinese source, lowering localization barriers. Specialized agents also monitor ad compliance in real time.

Overall consensus: AI agents will become the foundational infrastructure for enterprises, turning passive response into proactive creation, and driving a “marketing equalization” where even small firms enjoy enterprise‑level intelligent marketing capabilities.