Alibaba Group smashed its 24-hour November 11 Singles’ Day sales tally from last year, recording a total gross merchandise volume (GMV) of more than CNY168.2 billion, up 39.4% on last year. The amount is nearly four times the combined online sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. The event was held for the ninth time. Dubbed the Double Eleven or 11.11, it saw Alibaba taking a little over 13 hours to pass its total takings of USD18.1 billion from Singles’ Day in 2016. The online shopping spree has been held by the firm every November 11 since 2009, with brands from China and around the world offering steep discounts on its Taobao market place and Tmall online stores. “Sales of 157 merchants exceed CNY100 million; 17 merchants exceed CNY500 million; 5 merchants exceed CNY1 billion,” said Alibaba Chief Executive Daniel Zhang.

In the first three minutes after midnight on November 11, Alibaba recorded CNY10 billion in spending. Last year it took six minutes to reach the same amount. A total of 140,000 brands took part this year, up 40% from last year, including 60,000 international brands. More than 15 million products were on offer. Alibaba said foreign brands including Gap, Bose, Casio, C&A, Vero Moda, Jack Jones and Miss Sixty. Global purchasers are able to join the festival in China through Alibaba’s delivery arm Aliexpress that enables shoppers around the world to purchase goods from Chinese online merchants.

Nine out of 10 people used mobile wallet apps for payment, with Alibaba’s Alipay app handling 1.48 billion transactions in 24 hours and processing them at a peak rate of 256,000 transactions per second.

Artificial intelligence (AI), robots and drones played a more important role in this year’s event as the sheer volume of products make it practically impossible for employees to keep up, and is part of a broader push by China to embrace AI. Tmall Smart Selection, an AI-powered recommendation algorithm helped buyers to make a decision. The algorithm is backed by the latest advances in deep learning and natural language processing. AI-powered customer service chatbot Dian Xiaomi is another of Alibaba’s tech tools to help make businesses smarter and more efficient. The chatbot can understand more than 90% of customer enquiries and serve almost 3.5 million users a day. In the more advanced “cloud” version made available this year, the service also features the capability to understand customers’ emotion through text analysis and alert customer service staff for priority handling. Once the products are selected, the orders are received automatically by robots for packaging and transport, such as in a newly opened automated warehouse operated by Alibaba’s delivery arm, Cainiao Network, in Huizhou, a city near Shenzhen in Guangdong province. The 200 robots can process 1 million shipments per day. Alibaba is also experimenting with drone deliveries, the South China Morning Post reports.