Alibaba Cloud is using AI to help it use less AI

Alibaba is one of the world’s leading sources of large language models, yet its cloudy arm is proudly showing off its own technology that finds ways to avoid using them. Alibaba Cloud has built a system to analyze its customers’ tech support queries that often avoids using large language models to solve the problem, an approach it says has proven faster, cheaper, and more accurate. China’s top cloud provider shared its work at this week’s SIGKDD 2026, the annual conferenc