Alibaba opens interactive “Wonder Avenue” AI experience to engage fans during Paris 2024 

Alibaba Wonder Avenue will welcome fans free of charge throughout the Games to demonstrate how technology is evolving the e-commerce experience. An intelligent shopping assistant – powered by Qwen, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary language model – will provide a personalised service to each visitor, demonstrating the power of AI by leveraging Qwen’s multilingual and image-generation capabilities.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach attended the official opening of Alibaba Wonder Avenue on 27 July and hailed the impact that Alibaba’s AI expertise is already having on the Olympic Movement. “Alibaba’s Wonder Avenue is the latest example of how our partnership is taking the Olympic Movement into the digital age,” he said.

Showcasing the “Future of Shopping”

Visitors to Wonder Avenue will be able to take a journey through the "Future of Shopping", consisting of four stages. First, visitors will create a personal avatar with the help of Alibaba’s AI chatbot. In the second stage, they will receive personalised recommendations for perfumes and cosmetics and apply virtual makeup. The third stage involves dressing their avatar using voice commands and generating personalised images. Finally, visitors participate in a digital fashion show with their avatar, with the experience captured in photos and videos.

Alibaba Wonder Avenue, located near the Fontaine du Cirque at the eastern end of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, will be open daily during the Olympic Games (27 July to 11 August) and will reopen for the Paralympic Games (29 August to 8 September).

Celebrating the achievements of female athletes at the Olympic Games

In collaboration with the IOC, Alibaba has also marked Paris 2024 with the launch of a special short film dedicated to the evolution of women’s sport throughout the history of the Olympic Games. The film highlights the progress that has been made in achieving gender equality on the field of play, with Paris 2024 becoming the first Games to distribute quota places evenly between female and male athletes.

Entitled “To the Greatness of HER”, the eight-minute video leveraged Alibaba’s cloud-based AI to colourise and restore archive photographs of female athletes’ achievements from past Games, including those of French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen, who won gold in the women’s singles and mixed doubles at the Olympic Games Antwerp 1920.

“‘To the Greatness of HER’ highlights the great progress of women in sport through the course of history,” said President Bach. “My heartfelt thanks go to our friends at Alibaba for using AI-powered technology to let the achievements of these women in sport shine through the full spectrum of colours. More importantly, the film allows us to reflect on one of the most important priorities of the Olympic community – empowering women in and through sport. Gender equality is a team sport. We all have a role to play, and we all have to lead by example. With this film, Alibaba is leading by example and using its technological expertise to highlight this important topic.”

The film also features interviews with pioneering athletes such as Morocco’s Nawal El Moutawakel, the first woman from an Islamic nation to win an Olympic medal, and China’s Zhang Shan, who made history at the Olympic Games Barcelona 1992 by winning gold in the mixed-gender skeet shooting event.