An exclusive Q&A with alibaba.com’s Kuo Zhang

Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. The launch of OpenClaw just a few months ago marked a significant shift in what agentic AI meant — and more importantly, what it could unlock for businesses worldwide.

Now, alibaba.com is offering an early glimpse of that future with Accio Work, a brand new agentic system that deploys a team of digital employees to handle complex business tasks 24/7.

To higher understand what Accio Work delivers today, what comes next, and what it means for a way businesses can be run, we sat down with Kuo Zhang, President of alibaba.com, for an exclusive Q&A.

In today’s AI rundown:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

The Rundown: To really grow to be an agent-centered organization, Zhang said teams will first should concentrate on three key things — prioritizing the business value of agentic AI, constructing checkpoints for transparency, and rethinking how teams operate.

Cheung: As AI moves from assistant to operator, what has to vary inside an organization before handing core operations to an AI agent?

Zhang: The mindset shift needed to maneuver from AI as a helper to an operator starts with specializing in value, not only activity. Early on, we were impressed by how briskly AI could write or process data, but for an AI operator, those are only basic capabilities. Success is in regards to the high-value decisions it could navigate and the actual profit it could bring for the business.

You furthermore mght should construct checkpoints. Handing core operations to AI doesn’t mean letting it run wild. You wish clear guardrails, breaking complex tasks into smaller steps where the AI proves its work at every stage, ensuring a small digital mistake doesn’t turn right into a real-world disaster.

Finally, the team has to maneuver from doing the “grunt work” to designing the logic. People grow to be the architects and referees who set the standards and supply the ultimate human sign-off — not replaced by AI, but upgraded to administer it.

Why it matters: The move to agent-driven work starts from the bottom up. As latest models and capabilities keep emerging, the advantage for businesses will come from identifying what actually moves the needle for them — and constructing workflows, guardrails, and policies around it.

The Rundown: Accio Work sets up Qwen-powered agent teams for businesses (based on their goals), with different connectors, skills, and computer use capabilities enabling the “digital workforce” to handle multistep tasks across functions by itself.

Cheung: How does Accio Work construct an agent team?

Zhang: Accio Work assembles a fleet of specialised agents based in your described goals — no code. However the system is fully customizable: you may manually configure agents, form your individual team mixtures, and most significantly, encapsulate your individual expertise into reusable skills that shape how your agents behave.

Users manage the agents through an app. What changes is what management means. As a substitute of coordinating people and tasks, the founder’s job becomes configuring and monitoring this digital workforce — setting the parameters, reviewing outputs at key checkpoints, and progressively refining how the agents operate.

Cheung: Are you able to walk us through an actual workflow that it could handle today?

Zhang: Take launching an e-commerce business. The agent analyzes real-time market trends, selects products, and performs one-click store setup on Shopify, Amazon, or TikTok Shop. It then conducts multi-round supplier negotiations autonomously, securing the perfect price before surfacing the ultimate deal on your approval.

Once approved, it handles logistics tracking, contract drafting, and VAT filing prep. The human role is final sign-off on payments and regulatory submissions, not managing the method itself.

Why it matters: This shows how work is beginning to shift from managing each step to easily defining outcomes — set the goal, and a team of agents handles execution by chaining together tools and skills. Humans step in where it matters most, while the agents handle all the pieces in between.

The Rundown: Zhang sees an agent-to-agent future for businesses, where autonomous agents communicate with one another and take actions across most workflows, leaving only business-critical decisions to their human managers.

Cheung: With Accio Work and similar agents, what is going to running an organization seem like five years from now?

Zhang: The longer term of B2B is A2A (agent to agent). Think most business tasks flowing between autonomous agents, with minimal human initiation. What makes this work in practice is that these agents will operate inside sandboxed environments, staying inside human-defined parameters for anything sensitive or high-stakes. So, autonomy and accountability will coexist, not trade off against one another.

Cheung: If an agent makes a costly mistake, who owns that final result?

Zhang: Responsibility stays with the human, by design. Our system is in-built such a way that any motion with access to personal files or real financial / legal consequences would require explicit human approval before it’s executed.

In tasks like VAT filings, for instance, Accio provides semi-automated assistance — it does the preparation (identifying local regulations, organizing the information, and reducing the manual burden), but the ultimate submission goes through human channels. The agent handles execution, but accountability never leaves the person running the business.

Why it matters: Whilst AI agents take over key business functions, responsibility for his or her actions will at all times stick with humans. It will shift the job from doing the work to overseeing it and owning the outcomes, making judgment and decision-making critical to running agent-driven businesses of the longer term.

The Rundown: Zhang noted that agentic platforms like Accio Work will level the playing field between small startups and huge enterprises, with the largest skill for professionals becoming the flexibility to set success standards for AI and assess them.

Cheung: How will these agent platforms change hiring? Which skill do you think that becomes more beneficial?

Zhang: The concept of headcount as a proxy for capability breaks down entirely with agentic AI.

A solo founder with the proper agent platform can handle sourcing, multi-market compliance, and negotiations that previously required a team — effectively leveling the playing field against much larger competitors.

Zhang added: The best-value professionals amid this shift can be those with deep enough domain expertise to set meaningful success criteria and catch AI errors. That expertise itself becomes a brand new asset: packageable into reusable skills, monetised in a marketplace, portable across employers in a way it never was before. 

Why it matters: As agent teams handle execution, the skilled edge shifts from doing the work to knowing what beauty like. Zhang’s key insight: domain expertise becomes packageable and portable — turning right into a monetizable asset in a way traditional job skills never were.

Zhang:That AI agents are meant to exchange people — they’re not. They are supposed to grow to be a “dedicated team of experts.” Many individuals imagine that AI must be fully autonomous and complete complex tasks in a single step, but in point of fact, the true value lies in humans and AI co-constructing verifiable, iterative workflows.

One capability AI agents still fundamentally lack?

ZhangWhile AI reasoning is scaling fast, they still lack ‘physical grounding’— bridging the gap between digital intelligence and real-world execution.

Zhang: Many tech leaders are hyper-focused on general AI and consumer tools, but we firmly imagine that consumer (C-end) apps are for killing time; Business (B-end) tools are for creating wealth.

Zhang: Probably just months.

See you soon,