Alibaba's AI Push Drives E-Commerce Growth: More Upside Ahead?

Alibaba Group's BABA aggressive pivot toward artificial intelligence faces mounting skepticism as investors question whether ambitious technology investments will translate into sustainable profitability. While the company touts AI-powered breakthroughs across its e-commerce ecosystem, mounting costs and execution risks cloud the outlook for meaningful returns.

Alibaba.com's November 2025 launch of AI Mode attempts to capitalize on the generative AI wave sweeping B2B commerce. The feature integrates agentic AI capabilities powered by Accio, the platform's AI search engine, promising to revolutionize supplier discovery and evaluation. The company points to strong momentum, with European order volume surging 57% year over year and active suppliers worldwide growing 50%. However, these growth metrics mask deeper concerns about monetization challenges in an increasingly commoditized B2B marketplace.

The planned AI subscription service, priced at $20 monthly or $99 annually, represents BABA's attempt to extract revenues from technology that competitors increasingly offer for free. With ByteDance, PDD Holdings, and JD.com aggressively undercutting on price while simultaneously deploying their own AI capabilities, Alibaba's window to establish premium pricing power may be closing rapidly.

November's announcements about rebranding the Tongyi app to Qwen and integrating agentic shopping features into Taobao underscore the company's efforts to differentiate in a crowded AI landscape. The partnership with JPMorgan on tokenized payments and blockchain-based cross-border settlements adds complexity without clarity on adoption timelines or revenue contribution.

While Alibaba positions itself as China's AI infrastructure leader with commitments exceeding $53 billion over three years, investors must weigh whether these capital-intensive bets will generate adequate returns or simply fund a costly arms race with better-positioned domestic and international rivals.

Competitive Landscape: JD.com and Amazon's AI Strategies

JD.com JD has deployed AI extensively across its supply chain infrastructure, leveraging autonomous delivery vehicles and fully automated warehouses to optimize logistics efficiency. JD.com's active user base surpassed 700 million as of October 2025, supported by AI-powered advertising agents and the ChatRhino large language model serving merchant operations. The company's investment in embodied AI robotics startups totaling approximately $280 million demonstrates JD.com's commitment to AI-driven operational excellence. Meanwhile, Amazon AMZN continues expanding its AI e-commerce toolkit with consumer-facing features, including the Rufus shopping assistant, which saw 210% year-over-year interaction growth, and the Help Me Decide recommendation tool. Amazon also launched Project Amelia to assist sellers and introduced Alexa+, incorporating agentic AI for automated purchasing. Amazon's AI infrastructure investment through AWS Bedrock powers procurement automation tools, positioning Amazon as both an e-commerce innovator and enterprise AI provider competing across multiple fronts.

BABA’s Share Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

BABA shares have surged 81.4% in the year-to-date period, outperforming the Zacks Internet – Commerce industry and the Zacks Retail-Wholesale sector’s growth of 10.6% and 5.9%, respectively.

BABA’s YTD Price Performance

From a valuation standpoint, BABA stock is currently trading at a forward 12-month price/sales ratio of 2.37X compared with the industry’s 2.36X. BABA has a Value Score of D.

BABA’s Valuation

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2026 earnings is pegged at $6.57 per share, implying a 27.08% year-over-year decline.

Alibaba currently has a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell).

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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