B2B Marketplace Evolution through AI and Automation

  • Authors

    • Dr. Joon-Ho Lee Department of Financial Economics Yonsei University, South Korea. Author
    • Dr. Sung-Jae Kim Department of Financial Economics Yonsei University, South Korea. Author

    Published 2026-01-14

  • B2B Marketplaces, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Digital Procurement, Platform Economics, Intelligent Supply Chains, Algorithmic Pricing, Enterprise Commerce

    Issue

    Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)

    Section

    Articles

    How to Cite

    Lee, J.-H., & Kim, S.-J. (2026). B2B Marketplace Evolution through AI and Automation. International Journal of Commerce, Finance and Digital Economy, 1(1), 41-53. https://worldcometresearchgroup.com/index.php/ijcfe/article/view/40

  • Abstract

    Last 20 years Business-to-Business (B2B) marketplaces have experienced an overhaul of the structural features of its systems, developing out of inertial electronic listings and towards dynamic, information-driven digital ecosystems. Electronic procurement involved the reduction of costs that were incurred by suppliers and the initial B2B standards were mainly concerned with the digitalization of the transaction, finding cheaper suppliers and ultimately cost reduction. Although these platforms were efficient as compared to manual sourcing, it was poor in scalability, flexibility, and decision intelligence. The emerging complexity of world supply chains, heightened volatility of demand, and rising demands on transparency and speed have revealed basic constraints in the traditional B2B marketplace architectures. Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become critical facilitators on how to resolve these challenges. Artificial intelligence-based recommendation engines, on-demand predictive pricing, automatic bargaining, dynamic pricing, and smart supplier selection are reimagining the concept of initiating, negotiating, and satisfying a B2B deal. At the same time, workflow orchestration technologies and robotic process automation (RPA) are leading to less operational friction with repetitive tasks being automated, including onboarding, compliance verification, order processing, invoicing and dispute resolution. Combined, AI and automation are changing B2B marketplaces away to be passive clearing systems into active orchestrating systems with the capacity to optimize the results between buyers and sellers and their ecosystem partners. It is a detailed architecture-based examination of the transformation of B2B marketplaces with AI and automation in this paper. It involves synthesising previous scholarly and industry studies, hypothesising a stratified approach to methodological approaches of AI-enabled B2B platforms and assessing the operational and strategic effects of automation in procurement, logistics, pricing and governance processes. The paper also addresses the empirical findings that have been experienced in digitally mature B2B ecosystems and the discussion highlights an improvement in efficiency, strong resilience, and decision quality. At last, essential issues and ethical concerns, as well as future research opportunities are outlined in the paper that places AI-based B2B marketplaces in the heart of the next-generation digital commerce.

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