Start selling now
Six minutes before a customer meeting, Shipbear’s AI setup prepared an initial customer briefing: the customer’s background, previous interactions, likely pain points, and recommended meeting objectives. In another case, it took just one minute to retrieve the company’s experience with Central Asian buyers and turn it into a relevant, credible pitch for a new prospect.
For Sunny Tsoi, the co-founder of Shipbear, these are not demonstrations of AI as a faster search box. They show what happens when a company gives AI both a memory and a way to act.
Shipbear, a Hong Kong-based cross-border supply chain service provider, has built its approach around a simple division of labor: an internal “AI Brain” preserves and interprets company knowledge, while AI agents help execute the work. By connecting Shipbear-developed Memtome, its knowledge system, with Alibaba.com’s Accio Work, Shipbear is trying to close the gap between finding information and using it at the right moment.
For overseas small and medium-sized businesses, entering the China supply chain can be both an opportunity and an operational challenge. Sourcing, quality control, warehousing, packaging, and global fulfilment each demand attention—often from teams that do not have the scale or resources of a large enterprise.
Shipbear was built to close that gap. The company provides end-to-end supply-chain support for overseas SMEs, serving as a bridge between businesses selling into global markets and the manufacturing and fulfilment capabilities behind them. In Sunny’s words, their clients can focus on selling their products while Shipbear helps make the work behind the sale happen.
As the business expanded, however, the challenge was no longer simply finding information. It was making sense of information scattered across market signals, customer conversations, platform data, internal documents, and individual colleagues’ experience.
“The problem is often not a lack of data. It is that the data lives in different systems and in different people’s heads.”
That is the challenge Shipbear set out to address with a two-part approach: an AI Brain that retains business knowledge, and an AI Agent that can put that knowledge to work.
Shipbear has used Alibaba.com for five years as an important channel for reaching global B2B customers. The company sees the platform’s value not merely in visibility, but in the quality of commercial conversations it can enable. In particular, Shipbear identifies Requests for Quotation (RFQs) as a meaningful entry point for genuine buying demand.
Some relationships that began with a single inquiry have developed into long-term partnerships. Alibaba.com also gave the team a clearer view of the customer journey. Instead of treating lead generation as a collection of disconnected activities, Shipbear could follow signals from exposure to inquiries, quotations, and transactions. This is where Accio Work entered the workflow by helping the team analyze which products, buyers, and markets deserved attention first.
For Shipbear, this means its team can ask Accio Work to review store inquiries, product information, advertising data and RFQ activity, then help identify the products, customers and markets that appear most worthy of follow-up. Rather than spending extensive time assembling data manually, staff can devote more energy to the work that calls for human judgement: shaping a commercial response, solving an exception or building a customer relationship.
Shipbear’s AI strategy is deliberately broader than using a chatbot for isolated tasks. The company decided to create what Sunny Tsoi calls an “AI Brain.”
That became Memtome, Shipbear’s knowledge system—a name combining “memory” and “tome.” It is intended to preserve useful context from company documents, meeting records, operating procedures, and accumulated market experience.
But an organizational memory alone was not enough. Accio Work serves as one AI agent platform in Shipbear’s workflow that can access relevant context and help turn it into action.
This insight led to Shipbear’s two-part model:
Shipbear’s working model: The AI Brain helps the organization remember and reason; the AI Agent helps the organization support execution.
A knowledge system can retain what the organization has learned, but it does not by itself prepare a customer meeting, organize platform signals, or support a repeatable operational process. Conversely, an AI agent becomes much more useful when it has trusted business context with which to work.
In practice, Shipbear uses the combination to support market and platform information handling, drafting customer replies, meeting preparation, and supporting SOP-driven workflows. The company also values the ability to connect its knowledge environment with other tools, instead of forcing its data into a single, closed system. Accio Work publicly highlights connectors, browser-based task support, and extensibility through tools such as MCP, features that align with Shipbear’s cross-platform approach.
The clearest example came from an everyday commercial situation. Before a customer meeting, Accio Work and Memtome prepared a complete set of recommendations in six minutes. The briefing brought together customer information, historical records, pain points, and meeting goals.
The result was valuable not simply because it was fast. It changed how the employee could use the preparation time. Instead of searching across documents and reconstructing the account history, the team could review the synthesized context, apply judgment, and focus on the conversation itself.
Sunny Tsoi described the meeting as smooth and the output as “fast, polished, and effective.” The case illustrates a practical measure of AI value: not how much content the system generates, but how much low-value information work it removes before a high-value human interaction.
The same logic applies to store operations. Accio Work can read Shipbear’s Alibaba.com inquiries, product information, advertising performance, and RFQ data, then help identify the products and customers most worth following up. Employees spend less time compiling information and more time interpreting buyer needs, negotiating, and building trust.
Cross-border selling requires more than language translation. It also requires context: how buyers in a market communicate, what proof they find persuasive, and which past experiences are relevant to a new conversation.
Shipbear had previously captured its experience with Central Asian customers in its AI Brain. When a new buyer from the region appeared, Accio Work retrieved that knowledge in about one minute and surfaced a relevant case showing how Shipbear had supported similar customers. The team could then use concrete experience rather than a generic sales script.
This is what it can mean for AI to “translate culture.” The system is not independently mastering a market’s culture; it is helping the company reuse its own hard-won experience at the point of need. That distinction keeps the claim grounded while revealing a larger opportunity: knowledge that once stayed with one employee can become an organizational asset.
Sunny Tsoi describes Shipbear’s internal AI journey in three stages: AI-applied, AI-native, and AI-transformed.
Most established companies begin at the AI-applied stage. Employees chat with an AI tool, ask it to draft emails, or use it to read documents. AI-native companies, by contrast, design the organization around agents from the beginning. But in Sunny Tsoi’s view, most SMEs do not need to rebuild themselves as AI-native startups. Their more relevant goal is AI transformation: redesigning processes and data so the business becomes AI-ready.
Consider a sales team in which every employee maintains a separate spreadsheet. Adding an AI tool that fills in those spreadsheets may save a little time, but it preserves the underlying fragmentation. The more transformative question is whether data can be centralized, automatically analyzed to generate actionable insights and recommendations—and whether the workflow itself can be redesigned.
That reframes AI adoption from “Which tool should we buy?” to “What company knowledge and process should we redesign?”
Fear of wasted investment can prevent smaller companies from starting AI transformation. Technology changes quickly, and a business may worry that today’s tool will soon become obsolete. Sunny Tsoi recommends beginning with an organizational AI Brain (Memtome) because it can bring an immediate return, while the knowledge remains useful even as models and applications evolve. Shipbear’s AI Brain is platform-agnostic and is designed to work with different AI models and AI agents as technology evolves.
An SME can start by organizing company documents, meeting notes, customer records, and SOPs in the Accio Work knowledge base. More advanced teams may connect external systems such as Memtome, Obsidian, Notion, or Google Drive. The specific repository matters less than the discipline of making knowledge structured, retrievable, and usable by an agent.
A practical sequence is:
Sunny Tsoi compares today’s rapidly changing AI models to fast but untamed horses. An AI agent provides the harness that turns raw capability into business effectiveness; a workspace such as Accio Work is the stable where those capabilities can be put to work.
The metaphor captures Shipbear’s central lesson. Access to a powerful model does not, by itself, create a business advantage. The company must connect that capability to its own assets, workflows, controls, and customers.
Shipbear’s six-minute meeting brief and one-minute retrieval of market experience are small examples, but that is precisely why they matter. They show AI transformation not as an abstract technology program, but as a series of moments in which the right organizational knowledge becomes usable at the right time.
For cross-border SMEs, the opportunity is not to remove people from trade. It is to remove the friction that keeps people from applying judgment, experience, and trust where those qualities matter most.
Join the sourcing platform of 200M+ global buyers and start your export journey
The world's leading B2B cross-border trade platform, helping businesses expand globally.
