Dama cuts 400 jobs! AI is replacing cross-border jobs

ChatGPT is very popular. The idea of ​​using AI to reduce costs and increase efficiency is gradually being recognized by cross-border sellers . Some big sellers have begun to try to use AI technology to replace manual labor and have achieved initial results, optimizing about 400 people. In the future, some positions of cross-border practitioners will be replaced.

In the view of some sellers, many jobs can now be completed by AI, which will greatly reduce the cost of employment for enterprises, and the recruitment needs of enterprises will be further reduced. In addition , the recruitment needs of many companies have declined since this year , and the industry generally recruits on demand or does not recruit . The current situation of cross-border practitioners is not optimistic.

When AI and cross-border e-commerce collide, industry advantages may tend to concentrate on top sellers.

Relying on AI technology, Huakai Yibai optimized 400 people

ChatGPT is becoming more and more popular. Nowadays, more cross-border sellers use ChatGPT to assist in optimizing copywriting, customer service responses, product selection, advertising, etc. Many sellers believe that AI technology can take over most of the work of operations, and the demand for operations will decrease in the future.

In fact, there are indeed big sellers who have relied on AI technology to streamline staff and save costs.

Recently, an investor asked Huakai Yibai a question: From the perspective of workload, how much manpower investment can the company be expected to save after AIGC is fully utilized?

Huakai Yibai responded that the company has continuously optimized the scale of basic sales staff, improved labor efficiency and reduced costs through system upgrades and iterations. From the end of 2020 to the present, about 400 basic sales staff have been optimized through system-assisted manual work. It is expected that after making full use of AIGC technology in the future, it will be able to save manpower investment to a greater extent and effectively improve the company's operating efficiency.

It is understood that Huakai Yibai currently uses AIGC applications to carry out intelligent listing, intelligent price adjustment, intelligent advertising and other tasks , generating 200 million sets of copywriting, adjusting 300 million skus advertisements per month, and completing 100 million listing price adjustments in 2022. It is expected that in the future, the application can be further expanded in the direction of intelligent product selection and development, product image generation, customer service, stocking, price forecasting, and intelligent advertising delivery.

Huakai Yibai began to deploy AIGC in 2020, combining self-developed NLP (natural language processing) and related technologies to gradually promote and realize the development and progress of the company's cross-border e-commerce business.

ChatGPT understands and generates text, and is a text generation modality application model in AIGC technology applications. In the cross-border e-commerce industry, Huakai Yibai's application of AIGC is at the forefront of AI technology deployment.

ChatGPT is now very popular. Many big sellers such as Juxing Technology and Jihong Shares have already connected to ChatGPT. In the future, using AI technology to assist operations will become one of the important tasks of big sellers. Jihong Shares uses ChatGPT to help the company launch more than 10,000 new products, handle more than 100,000 customer chats and comfort conversations, obtain more than 70,000 new advertising copy, and process more than 20,000 image materials... and has achieved fruitful results. Such a workload will definitely replace the work of positions such as product selection, design, and online customer service.

Not only big sellers, but other small and medium-sized sellers have also begun to try to use ChatGPT to replace manual work. Many sellers have reported that it is very intelligent and can greatly reduce workload and improve efficiency. Many peers also believe that ChatGPT can reduce the work of a team to one person.

It is worth noting that AI technology is still developing at a high speed. Yesterday, OpenAI released another big bomb - announcing the launch of plug-in functions, giving ChatGPT the ability to use tools, connect to the Internet, and run calculations.

The plug-ins launched by ChatGPT are web browsing plug-ins and code interpreters. It is also connected to the mathematical knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha, so you no longer have to worry about it talking nonsense. This will help users calculate mathematics and retrieve the latest information accurately.

In the future, ChatGPT will become even more powerful, more powerful than we can imagine.

Performance declined, and many sellers stopped recruiting

With the continuous development of AI technology, applications like ChatGPT will be increasingly used in cross-border e-commerce , helping sellers reduce costs and improve labor efficiency and profits.

Since the beginning of this year, competition among cross-border sellers has become increasingly fierce. Many sellers have reported declining sales, difficulty in promoting new products, and no profit from old products. In order to get orders, the price war between peers is fierce. In order to maintain rankings, many sellers are willing to sell at a loss. In addition, the tightening of policies on platforms such as Amazon has increased sellers' logistics costs, advertising costs and other costs.

At the end of March, many sellers reported that their recent sales were so poor that it was alarming. Some sellers asked helplessly: "When will the traffic be better? Are Americans really out of money?" Some sellers even do not plan to participate in today's Member Day promotion.

When sellers’ performance is sluggish and demand is declining, they will naturally reduce their staff or stop hiring. A big seller introduced the situation of his company. He had set growth goals and staff recruitment goals at the beginning of the year, but after seeing the situation in the first quarter, he basically stopped hiring.

Some colleagues also said that the company has only hired one person this year, and it is highly likely that no new people will be hired throughout the year. The practice for personnel recruitment is that personnel recruitment needs to match business development. For example, if the existing staff can just hold X sales, then no new people will be hired. When the business gradually grows to X+N, the existing staff will no longer be enough, and then consider hiring one more person.

More sellers said they were also implementing the same recruitment principle, recruiting people based on output value, and only teams that reached the output value were allowed to recruit people. At present, it has become a consensus among many sellers not to arbitrarily expand the scale and recruit employees, and to maintain the current development status.

Some veteran sellers have said that Amazon’s overall purchasing power has declined, and with the application of various backend AI technologies, there will be some uncertainty in future orders and profits. Therefore, it is safer for a company to be smaller and have fewer people.

There are also sellers who hold similar views, saying that nowadays, you can use ChatGPT to write copy, and midjourney or other applications to make pictures. Technological advances have greatly reduced labor costs, so the recruitment needs of enterprises are also further reduced.

There is less demand from companies, but the number of people working in the cross-border industry has not decreased. After the Chinese New Year, I kept hearing sellers mention that during the family reunion, when relatives learned that I was working in the cross-border e-commerce industry, they would try to ask questions like whether their children, who had just graduated, could come to my company to study. Previously, the cross-border e-commerce track was hot, and many laymen still thought that cross-border e-commerce could make money.

A boss in the industry said that since March this year , he has received at least 99 messages every day , too many to click through them all. The number of people submitting resumes has increased significantly compared to the past , and he is unable to interview all of them .

Other bosses have the same feeling. There are many interviewees this year, and some of them are transferred from other industries to the cross-border e-commerce industry. Of course, there are also some operational personnel who have worked in the industry for several years and have rich experience.

The number of cross-border job seekers has increased and competition has intensified. This environment has coincided with a decrease in industry recruitment. Cross-border people should have a sense of crisis.

In the context of too many cross-border sellers wanting to further reduce costs and ensure profits, and with the rapid development of AI technology that can help sellers complete tasks such as advertising copywriting, product selection and development, and customer service responses, more cross-border practitioners will be replaced by artificial intelligence in the future .

AI

ChatGPT

Cross-border e-commerce