China’s AI giants are building agentic companies differently than the US. I’ve spent years inside this (PKU professor, teaching ecommerce at Alibaba, doing AI research for Tencent). Now I help mgmt teams launch agentic initiatives fast. I post daily on: - AI agents and agentic organizations - How Alibaba, Tencent and others actually deploy AI - Robotics and embodied AI from China Follow for the China / Asia view on the agentic shift. My free book is available in the replies.

Another good day. workbuddy, workbuddy, workbuddy

When everyone can be Spielberg, don't be a studio. Be YouTube. AI video is turning every creator into a studio. The big winners will be the platforms, not the producers. That’s what iQIYI is doing right now. Listen to the full episode: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Amazon Is Blocking AI Shopping Agents. Alibaba Built Its Own. Why isn't Amazon doing What Alibaba is doing with Qwen? I have spent a lot of time with Alibaba's cloud division in Hangzhou. And they are moving fast in connecting agents and ecommerce. (Full episode on Apple Podcasts, link below.) Here's what to pay attention to: 1. Qwen is Alibaba's front door for consumers. The goal is to shop on Taobao, to book on Fliggy and to pay with Alipay without leaving the chat. That's really smart. Connecting Qwen (a popular AI assistant with 300M MAU) with your suite of ecommerce services. Why isn't Amazon doing this? 2. DingTalk wants to be your agent operating system at work. For commerce, I think it's mostly DingTalk right now. Which serves 20M organizations. Same approach as Qwen. A business trip gets booked, approved and expensed with no manual receipts. QwenWork is also growing fast. 3. Amap takes spatial intelligence into the real world. A smart mapping app is an interesting approach to ecommerce. It can rank restaurants by how far people actually drive to visit, not by fake reviews. One to watch in agents + commerce. Amap has 370M DAU. ***Takeaways for Managers: → Pick one customer journey and list every step an AI agent could complete end to end. → Test Accio or Aidge (cross-border AI tools) on one real sourcing or cross border sales task. I go deeper on this in Episode 275 of The Tech Strategy Podcast. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… QUESTION: Which Alibaba app would you trust to act for you first, and why?

Him: “Can you watch my laptop while I go to the bathroom?” Me: “You don’t need to do that here.” In Thailand and Japan this week, High trust societies are better than high income ones.