When you discover the ways Chinese company Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce marketplace with $248 billion in transactions (more than eBay and Amazon combined), invests in artificial intelligence and machine learning, you realize quickly that the list of what it doesn't impact is much shorter. Since 1999 when the company was launched in founder Jack Ma's apartment, Alibaba's core business remains to sell goods, but its influence and operations have expanded to make it one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. One of the reasons Alibaba and other Chinese tech companies such as Tencent and Baidu, collectively known as BAT, are making extraordinary gains in artificial intelligence is the support, investment and commitment of the Chinese government to become the dominant AI player in the world. With plans to build a $1 trillion AI industry by 2030, China is on a path to overtake the United States as the world's leader in technology. Along with an enormous population that generates critical data to inform AI algorithms and help make them better as well as a society who is keen on technological change and not as pushy on regulation, China is fertile ground to develop AI applications, and Alibaba is moving full throttle ahead. In fact, Alibaba invested in seven research labs that will focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, network security, natural language processing and more.

Ant Financial found through data analysis that young women who like tight jeans have their phone screens replaced more frequently. It then launched "screen insurance" targeting the demographic, China Daily Reports. And that is just one of the fascinating examples of how the combination of human and machine intelligence can drive unexpected business outcomes when applied to a vast data pool . The "smart customer service," a system launched in 2015 for automated customer calls, has recently surpassed human performance in terms of customer satisfaction. AI is an important technology that generates value from data.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has decided to use AI technology to help China boost its pig-husbandry industry, which has long been plagued with poor efficiency and high labor costs. An AI program could help identify and predict diseases and boost fertility by analyzing swine behavior, according to an online announcement last week by Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba's cloud computing arm. Teaming up with livestock farming companies Sichuan Tequ Group and Dekon Group, the e-commerce giant has invested millions of yuan to build an AI system that can keep a record of every single hog, including their breed, age in days, diet, weight and movement. The system is able to help each sow give birth to three more piglets per year and reduce the mortality rate by around 3 percent, according to an early-stage experiment. "If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes," said Zhang Haifeng, chief information officer of Tequ Group.

Alibaba is redefining China's online shopping experience by embedding artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its core e-commerce operations. Technology has made shopping easy for customers who leverage AI to search for products, said Jim Erickson and Susan Wang in an article on Alizila.com. Thanks to smart search engines, consumers are now introduced to several goods and services that they were not previously aware of. Alibaba has also introduced customer-service chatbots that can resolve consumer complaints without requiring human intervention. While previously orders were delivered in days, they now reach consumers in a matter of few hours.