24-hour online Agents are bringing batches of orders to foreign trade enterprises

Foreign trade salespeople at 2 a.m. can finally sleep soundly.

This is one of the most intuitive changes felt by front - line foreign trade workers after integrating Agent into the workflow.

In the past, overseas buyers would inquire and ask for prices across time differences of more than a dozen hours. To not miss cross - time - zone business opportunities, salespeople often had to be on standby 24/7. Once they relaxed for a moment, business opportunities might disappear into the vast Internet. Moreover, even if they replied to the messages in time, the deal might fall through due to language barriers or cultural differences that led to "saying the wrong thing".

As an enterprise that has been deeply involved in foreign trade SaaS for more than two decades, Futong Tianxia has witnessed every technological change in the industry: informatization, large models, intelligent agents... This company has always been thinking about one question: how can new technologies truly solve the pain points of the foreign trade industry?

With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Lin Qi, the co - founder and CTO of Futong Tianxia, has personally experienced the real pressure and helplessness in the foreign trade industry. That's why Lin Qi has high expectations for what AI Agent can achieve. This year, Futong Tianxia deeply integrated Tencent Cloud ClawPro into its private - domain marketing management cloud platform. What Lin Qi saw was an all - day - long online AI customer service that not only supports the languages of many countries around the world, "even more professional than salespeople, capable of learning and conducting background checks on customers' preferences, tones, or the religious and cultural habits of different countries". The data is more convincing. After more than 60,000 foreign trade enterprise customers deeply used Futong Tianxia Agent, the inquiry - to - deal conversion rate increased from less than 3% to 8% - 20%, the proportion of high - value inquiries increased by 40%, the timely response rate of independent websites reached 98%, and the proportion of first - page rankings on Google increased by 30%.

Lin Qi, co - founder and CTO of Futong Tianxia

After achieving real conversion rates, Lin Qi felt that this time, they no longer had to be anxious about the productivity revolution brought by AI.

How does AI Agent work from customer acquisition to deal closing?

For foreign trade practitioners, the most core business is "customer acquisition".

On one hand, it's getting harder and harder to find customers. On the other hand, many enterprises are still using extremely inefficient methods to acquire customers. "Foreign trade salespeople need to search for customers through various channels such as Google, social media platforms, exhibition websites, and foreign B2B platforms according to the company's characteristics, which is like looking for a needle in a haystack," Lin Qi described the daily routine of most foreign trade salespeople. "After finding customers, they still have to find contact information and then send mass emails, and often get no response."

Adding a customer doesn't mean real conversion. Especially after the customer starts to make an inquiry, the salesperson has to quickly consider and judge many things: "What's the customer's strength? Does our quotation have an advantage? Can our production capacity and delivery cycle meet the requirements?" Lin Qi said that there are even some "scam" inquiries, which require the salesperson to have the ability to distinguish between true and false. "If a salesperson prepares seriously, it will take two or three hours for one inquiry." This is a fatal blow to the foreign trade industry that pursues efficiency.

But with the emergence of Agent, everything has changed. After integrating Tencent Cloud ClawPro, Futong Tianxia created an intelligent agent matrix. They divided the industry agents into three major roles, namely the customer - acquisition AI robot, the customer - relationship AI digital human, and the decision - making AI assistant. Lin Qi found that "the work efficiency of AI is a dimensionality reduction strike on humans, equivalent to 100 people against 1 person."

In specific scenarios, this "100 - to - 1" ratio first changes the two most difficult parts of the foreign trade chain.

One part is to find and catch customers. After receiving an inquiry, conducting background checks, making quotations, and writing responses can all be done by the Agent, and the whole process can be completed in a few minutes. The quotation refers to historical orders, and the response can be sent directly. The AI customer service is online 24/7, with an instant response rate of 98% for inquiries. It refers to the product knowledge base and historical order data, and the quality of responses to professional questions is twice as high as that of humans. By filling these two parts at the same time, the inquiry conversion rate has increased from the industry average of less than 3% to 8% - 20%. You know, the traffic on public - domain platforms is getting more and more expensive, and the industry is becoming more and more competitive. Many enterprises can't even maintain a 1% conversion rate.

Catching inquiries is only half of the story. The other half is to let customers come to you on their own, which is what independent websites need to solve. Independent websites are difficult to operate because of low operational efficiency and a shortage of talents. To do a good job in SEO, one needs to understand keywords, content, and external links; advertising requires another set of talents. Recruiting is expensive, and it's hard to retain employees. So many enterprises' independent websites are left idle after being built and cannot achieve efficient traffic generation. Futong Tianxia uses Agent to solve this problem. They break down the operation of independent websites into individual skill modules that can be automatically executed. With one command, the intelligent agent will analyze industry trends, generate professional content that meets the reading habits of overseas buyers, and handle keyword layout and platform distribution at the same time. Many new customers come to the door on their own.

Gao Shaolei, a technology expert from Tencent Cloud

Futong Tianxia's path is actually a microcosm of the AI transformation of the entire foreign trade industry. Gao Shaolei, a technology expert from Tencent Cloud who has long been involved in the technical implementation of SaaS projects, has a more direct judgment on this industry: "In the foreign trade scenario, cross - time - zone and cross - language are basic problems that almost all enterprises have to face. But the bigger bottleneck is actually talent." Gao Shaolei said that in the AI era, the requirements for enterprises and talents are diverging into two lines. One is the technical side, where model training and inference require stronger technical capabilities. The other is the business side. People who can really make good use of AI need to have a deep understanding of specific scenarios and know how to combine AI capabilities with industry professionalism in scenarios such as marketing management, data management, and business management.

On the business model level, his judgment is also worthy of attention. "The core logic of SaaS enterprises in the past was subscription, but this logic is being rewritten in the AI era." The real problem facing all SaaS enterprises is no longer which model to use, but how to make good use of the model. Behind this is a comprehensive competition in product design, scenario understanding, and data accumulation.

What has Tencent Cloud done to dispel the "anxiety"?

Many people don't know that at the beginning of the AI wave, Lin Qi's first feeling was anxiety.

As early as 2016, Futong Tianxia started an intelligent attempt, trying to make good use of the large amount of email communication data accumulated over the years with the cloud computing and big - data analysis technologies at that time. Unfortunately, despite contacting several domestic and foreign teams, this technology was completely "useless".

So, when DeepSeek, OpenClaw and others became popular overnight, Lin Qi wanted to see AI really applied in his own industry and achieve results.

As a partner of Futong Tianxia since 2021, the Tencent Cloud team is very clear about the enterprise's anxiety. Initially, the cooperation between the two sides mainly focused on cloud infrastructure. As large - model and intelligent - agent technologies became more and more mature, Tencent Cloud began to expand more cooperation with Futong Tianxia.

Gao Shaolei believes that some enterprises are still at the stage of "calling models and building a demo" today, but the truly valuable thing is to embed AI into the business process. For example, at the R & D level, the R & D personnel of Futong Tianxia can use CodeBuddy to achieve automated AI programming, testing, and post - maintenance. "Previously, a project might take a month, but now it can be implemented in a week." This means that the product iteration speed has been greatly improved, and new capabilities can be brought to the market faster.

The ADP intelligent - agent development platform, which Futong Tianxia has used for the longest time, is also constantly being upgraded to match the business scenarios. "What we do more is to supplement more atomic capabilities in the process of connecting the entire workflow, combined with the customer's business scenarios." Gao Shaolei gave an example. Foreign trade enterprises come into contact with a large amount of product information, quotation sheets, customer documents, etc. every day. In the past, enterprises needed to call API interfaces by themselves to handle document parsing, knowledge bases, etc. After understanding this general requirement of the industry, Tencent Cloud quickly embedded document - parsing capabilities into the ADP platform.

Tencent Cloud provides a full - set of technical foundation, while Futong Tianxia has experience accumulation in a specific vertical industry. The combination of the two is "the combination of experts", which enables AI to truly deliver ideal results to customers.

With the anxiety gone, Lin Qi realized one thing: "In the SaaS era, we delivered tools. In the AI era, we deliver results."

Lin Qi compares foreign trade to the process of going out to sea to fish. In the past, enterprises relied more on experience to judge the direction and on salespeople to look for opportunities bit by bit. Later, with bigger ships and more advanced equipment, people went to more distant markets. And today, AI is becoming the most intelligent equipment on this fishing boat going out to sea. In this process, Futong Tianxia is also changing: "From the cloud infrastructure for 480 foreign trade enterprises in China in the past, it has risen to become a performance - growth consultant and management consultant for foreign trade enterprises."

Facing new technologies, waiting and hesitating are always safe choices. But for more enterprises, real growth opportunities always lie in the process of sailing into the deep sea. Only when enterprises really enter the business scenario will they find the efficiency improvement and growth potential that AI can bring. As Gao Shaolei said, "Be bold in innovation, and there may be more rewards."