SMEs and solopreneurs today face a myriad of challenges. With rising costs and growing competition, many businesses now operate with fewer staff members, or without dedicated expertise on business-critical areas, for instance, sourcing or supply chain.
As a result, time-poor founders and CEOs may deprioritise sourcing and revert to their usual suppliers, even when more competitive products, pricing or terms may be available elsewhere.
One solution Is Accio Work , Alibaba’com’s 24/7 agentic business team that helps SMEs automate end-to-end business tasks, moving beyond advice to execute work across research, sourcing, negotiation, marketing, sales, operations and CRM. It requires no code or setup and automates complex tasks such as sourcing, supplier research, procurement and marketing that would otherwise consume hours of manual effort.
While many AI tools draft, suggest or provide answers to specific prompts, Accio Work is designed to take a goal or business objective and create a specific action plan to deliver results. Its agents work in coordination with one another, providing SMEs with automated workflows rather than a series of isolated tasks. Users get access to a pre-configured team of AI agents without requiring technical setup, allowing them to set goals in natural language, while the system assembles specialist agents to work on the task autonomously. These agents can support businesses across the entire lifecycle, including product strategy and design, product and supplier search, comparison and vetting, enquiry and negotiation, store operations, marketing and sales.
Making sourcing more manageable
One of Accio Work’s special features is the Accio Sourcing Toolkit which has been designed to offer senior-level sourcing expertise to any growing SME or solopreneur. This toolkit can automate key sourcing tasks, including supplier identification, product and supplier comparisons, and bulk outreach, 24/7 – allowing founders to focus on other tasks.
SMEs can describe a product or product specification and use the toolkit to find the best-suited suppliers that can bring it to life. For founders who are flush with new product ideas but may not have the time or expertise to bring ideas to market, this is particularly powerful.
By automating manual research, outreach and supplier follow-up, the toolkit reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks linked to sourcing, making the process easier to manage and more impactful.
Supporting better supplier decisions
The Sourcing Toolkit also presents SMEs with a range of options from different suppliers for assessment ahead of formal negotiations. This can bring together a range of product and business-critical data points or factors, from pricing and delivery times to product availability, enabling enables SMEs to move from operating with instinct to making more evidence-based choices.
And it supports autonomous outreach and negotiation with suppliers, including follow-ups 24/7. But this is not about taking negotiation away from the business owner, rather, it helps SMEs access more comprehensive information on pricing and sourcing terms so they can pursue stronger business outcomes.
Moving faster from idea to execution
Finally, the Sourcing Toolkit combines product research, opportunity analysis and supplier discovery to help SMEs identify products with strong commercial potential. Once an opportunity has been identified, businesses can move directly into supplier discovery and sourcing. This can enable SMEs to capitalise on new and emerging trends with greater agility and reduce the time to market.
It draws on Alibaba.com’s decades of expertise in B2B commerce, allowing SMEs to access supplier and product intelligence that would otherwise be difficult to gather independently.
Accio Work is plug-and-play, with zero set-up, no configuration and no code. It is built for real business scenarios, with enterprise-grade security, sandboxed environments, granular permissions and user approval for sensitive actions.
The Next Step: CoCreate Pitch 2026
For founders who want to do more than just source their ideas but also bring them onto the international stage: Alibaba.com has redesigned the CoCreate Pitch Competition 2026 into a fully AI-driven product innovation contest with a total prize pool of over one million US dollars.
For the first time, applicants can register directly through Accio Work. A dedicated “CoCreate Pitch Agent” transforms early product ideas into structured pitch concepts and actionable business plans. The European Final will take place on November 19 and 20, 2026, in London.
