As the Official Agentic Business Partner of Smart Manufacturing Week in Birmingham from 3-4 June 2026, Alibaba.com is bringing Accio Work, its agentic AI platform for businesses, to the show floor to demonstrate how agentic AI can address the operational pressures facing UK manufacturers today.
At the heart of the partnership is a bespoke ‘Event Edition Agent’ built specifically for Smart Manufacturing Week. It brings together three practical tools in one place: ‘AI Expert Agents’, ‘Smart Navigation’ and ‘Industry Trend Reports’, giving visitors a live, hands-on way to find suppliers, compare products and make faster procurement decisions on the spot. Visitors can pre-register for free access to these tools here.
Accio Work acts as an agentic business team for SMEs, handling sourcing, supplier research and procurement and marketing tasks that would otherwise consume hours of manual effort. According to Alibaba.com’s recent study of over 500 UK SME owners, 40% are using AI at least once a week to help overcome day-to-day operational challenges. Time-saving was cited as the primary driver for the adoption (37%), followed by improving efficiencies (36%) and better decision making with better data and insights (22%).
The findings shed light on where that time is actually going, and which risk detracting business owners’ attention from business growth. More than a third (35%) said dealing with emails take up the most time each month, followed by bookkeeping (31%) and invoicing (17%). 19% of those surveyed said chasing late payments was the time-consuming task they liked the least, while over a quarter of SMEs use their evenings to complete such tasks.
Over half (53%) of SMEs believe that running their small business has become more complex in recent years. One of the biggest challenges is knowing which products to stock, develop or launch was a challenge, cited by 49% of respondents.
According to the research, the most frequently used AI-powered tools and services include research tools (26%), writing tools (25%), and AI assistants, such as chatbots (24%).
