AI Agents Aid E-Commerce, But Risks of One-Person Company Remain

Oner, a manufacturer of outdoor products based in Shandong Province, boasts a 5,000-square-meter facility and over two decades of traditional foreign trade experience. Although the company has a steady stream of loyal overseas clients, its core team is small, making it difficult to expand online sales channels.

As a result, the company decided to try Alibaba's newly launched AI Agent Accio Work, a plug-in to Alibaba's business-to-business services. The agent covers advertising analysis, Amazon data queries and exploration of new opportunities.

Oner linked its storefront to the agent and fed in a company introduction on products and production processes. With a single prompt, the preliminary setup of their online store was complete. The entire factory's production capacity, quality inspection system and diverse product matrix were brought online.

"We knew Accio Work could improve efficiency, but we didn't expect it to be this fast," said Yu Wenjuan, head of international operations at Oner.

The praise highlights one of Accio Work's core capabilities, which Alibaba called "one-click factory onboarding." The system parses various materials provided by merchants, including URLs, images, videos, text descriptions and zip files, and then automatically generates titles, product descriptions and detail pages based on international search trends and buyer preferences.

Accio Work is accessible to global users that can be directed through communication tools like Telegram and Discord. By May, two months after its launch, Alibaba's earnings report revealed that the user base of Accio Work had already surpassed 10 million.

However, data security has always been a critical focus for enterprises adopting these autonomous tools. Previously, open-source agent OpenClaw has caused concern as its architecture has excessive permissions with fragile default security configurations, making it easy to be breached and gain full access to the terminal.

Accio Work addresses this by utilizing a local-first architecture, ensuring that all file manipulations, terminal instructions and browser actions are executed directly on the user's own hardware.

Under this local agent configuration, the core orchestration logic remains entirely on the device itself, preventing sensitive business information from being transmitted to unauthorized third-party servers and eliminating the inherent vulnerabilities of cloud storage.

Accio Work is not the only AI service making waves. In May, NetEase launched its Tuoke Agent, or "client acquisition agent," designed specifically for existing business-to-business foreign trade companies.

Operating 24/7, this AI agent requires companies to simply input their primary industry and upload some core product materials. It then begins to continuously match potential clients, based on NetEase's global trade database and buyer profiles. Upon finding a match, the agent initiates communication, completes the first round of needs verification, including details like purchase volume, material requirements and target markets, and pushes the pre-screened leads to human salespeople.

It can safely be said that 2026 is the year of the AI revolution in e-commerce, particularly within the cross-border sector.

An established cross-border e-commerce team typically requires seamless coordination across multiple roles, including operations, design, customer service, advertising, and data analysis. But stockkeeping, longer inquiry chains and highly complex customer demands set an even higher bar for operational execution. What AI agents are actively transforming are workflows in cross-border e-commerce that used to be the most labor-intensive.

"In the past, many stages, from product selection and listing to keyword optimization, inquiry analysis, customer follow-ups, infringement checks and later-stage data reviews, were highly dependent on manual labor. Once an AI agent is integrated, a massive amount of repetitive work became automated," explained cross-border e-commence vendor named Yi Xingtian.

Yi, based in Wuhan, said he has been in the industry for over five years, now selling accessories and kitchen organizers on Amazon and Temu platforms.

"My company used to have one operator managing a single store, but now, one person can manage five stores simultaneously," he said. "It has practically transferred to the concept of a 'one-person company.' Product listings, weekly data reports and infringement checks can all be completed with a single click."

However, the widespread integration of AI agents and automated technologies has resulted in human job losses around the world. In the past two years, AI has become a justification for corporate restructuring.

Amazon, the biggest online retailer in the world, has eliminated nearly 30,000 corporate roles. Similarly, Groupon, the veteran discount e-commerce platform, announced a restructuring plan dubbed Project Foundry, aiming to rebrand itself as an AI company. Groupon has cut up to 400 positions globally, or about 23 percent of its workforce. The layoffs primarily impacted marketing and sales departments. The company said it expects to save up to US$25 million a year by replacing humans with automated systems.

This wave of layoffs appears to have spared China for the time being. Late last month, JD.com founder Richard Liu told his 900,000 employees that the company would not fire a single frontline employee because of automated or AI replacement. Although JD is extensively testing automated warehouses, delivery robots and AI trainers, its current strategy relies on internal absorption of job losses.

The shift to the concept of a "one-person company" isn't a foolproof ticket to success, especially for startups.

Mark Zhang, based in Beijing, started an e-commerce operation on the "one-person" concept this year after he was laid off from his former job as an app developer. Three months in, he admits his company has not made a single cent in profit. Instead, he spends over 1,900 yuan (US$264) every month subscribing to various AI tools.

Zhang confessed that he feels the one-person model is suitable only for mature companies looking to lower costs, rather than for companies starting from scratch. For example, when he needs to shoot TikTok videos for marketing or livestreams, he cannot fully trust AI and still has to verify everything himself. The mounting pressure has left him anxious and sleep-deprived.

"Doing everything alone means the hardest part isn't the business itself, but the psychological toll," he said. "There is no one to bounce ideas off of, no one to provide feedback and no one to share the pressure."

In Wuhan, Yi said that while many are drawn to the alluring concept of a one-person company, successful cross-border e-commerce fundamentally requires basic trade acumen, not just proficiency in using AI.

"Some people want to list a wide variety of goods right out of the gate and look for small factories for cheap production, which ultimately leads to supply chain breakdowns and unstable product quality," he said. "When setbacks occur, being completely alone takes a heavy toll on the founder's mindset. I believe that among those leveraging AI agents for foreign trade, it will ultimately be a process of elimination where only a small fraction will survive."