This week’s podcast is about Alibaba.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to our Tech Tours.

Here are the 4 engines:

1. Re-Igniting Growth in Their Now Re-Organized Ecommerce Business
2. Accelerating the Build Out of their Global Smart Logistics Network – Starting with Cross-Border Express Delivery
3. Big Investments in Alibaba Cloud. With Price Cuts to Push Adoption.
4. Pioneering New and Game Changing GenAI Services

Cheers from Paris,

Jeff

———

Related articles:

• Eddie Wu’s Alibaba: The Rise of an AI-First Ecommerce Empire (Tech Strategy)
• AutoGPT: The Rise of Digital Agents and Non-Human Platforms & Business Models (Tech Strategy – Podcast 163)
• Why ChatGPT and Generative AI Are a Mortal Threat to Disney, Netflix and Most Hollywood Studios (Tech Strategy – Podcast 150)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Generative AI
• Cloud Services
• Ecommerce
• Logistics

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Alibaba Cloud
• Cainiao
• Alibaba
• Tmall and Taobao

———transcription below

Episode 236 – Alibaba.1

Jeffrey Towson: [00:00:00] Welcome. Welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson, and this is the tech strategy podcast from Techmoat Consulting. And the topic for today, the four engines of Alibaba’s AI plus e commerce. Empire, let’s say. And basically, this is kind of what I think is going to happen next with them, especially in the next year, but really kind of the four major engines, pillars, whatever you want to call it, of what they are building, which is a combination of.

e commerce and AI. It’s, it’s kind of a new animal in many ways. It’s pretty awesome actually, but I’ll sort of break down how I see it. And that will be the topic for today. Let’s see, standard disclaimer here. Nothing in this podcast from my writing or website advice is invested in. Blah, blah, blah. Let me [00:01:00] try that again.

I’m trying to do it in one breath and nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information for me and any guests may be incorrect. If using impinges express may no longer be relevant or accurate overall, investing is risky. This is not investment legal or tax advice.

Do your own research. One breath. First time I’ve ever done that. Okay, cool. Let’s get into the topic. All right. Cool. Now I don’t really have any concepts for today. This is just kind of Alibaba. So, we’re going to talk about a lot of stuff So we’ll skip over that part. But all right now I’ve been spending kind of a lot of time with Alibaba I’ve been there quite a few times over the last year Lazada in Singapore went out there to chat with the CEO CTO Alibaba cloud I was just meeting with the head of international a month or so ago in Hangzhou, which is pretty awesome You , Cainiao met with them a couple of times this year, so, you know, and then Ant as well, but I’m not really going to talk about, , Ant per [00:02:00] se in this.

That’s a bit of a separate topic. So, I’ve been paying kind of a lot of attention to this company and also they’ve been making some pretty big changes in the last really year and a half. I mean, I’ve been following them for what, 12 years, but the last year or so things have really changed in the sense of, you know, they got sort of hit by Pinduoduo.

Uh, they started making a fairly major reorganization into six business units, and then a lot of key people left and a lot of key people emerged. So, it’s kind of like restructured, a new management team is basically in place and,, yeah, so there’s a lot going on right now. And then they’ve been doing some other things like exiting other businesses, like new retail, which was a big deal under previous CEO, Daniel Zhang.

And I think that’s pretty much gone. You know, they’ve sold Sun art and in time, the department stores, the supermarkets, the fresh hippos. I mean, they’re all the asset heavy stuff is going., they’re really looking like they’re [00:03:00] going down to the fundamentals,, sort of a lean and mean version of Alibaba is how I would think about it.

Okay. Now, within that, we have the new CEO. So, Eddie Wu is CEO at the group level, but he’s also CEO of cloud. And then we have the chairman, Joe Tsai, who’s chairman at the group level. And then he’s down there, chairman at a couple other levels like Cainiao., so that’s kind of the, up until a couple months ago, that was the key team to watch.

Um, and I’ve been referring to this as sort of like, they basically bought, brought back the wartime CEOs., Daniel Zhang was sort of moved out his group CEO. He went down to head up cloud., but then he was kind of, he left from there pretty quickly under the new reorg. He was supposed to run cloud and he was CEO for a while and then he sort of is gone.

And Eddie Wu who came in as new group CEO, Eddie Wu is the [00:04:00] CTO. I mean, his historically been one of the founders of Alibaba. He’s old guard and he was the CTO forever. So, he’s the deepest technologist in the group. So, he took over as CEO of cloud, which was really interesting. So, your CEO of cloud and your CEO of the group.

Okay. Then the CEO of domestic e commerce also left and Eddie Wu became CEO of that business too. So, it’s like, wait, one guy’s head of e commerce cloud and group. That seemed a little suspect. It’s like, all right, this is a placeholder. Something’s going to happen. And sure enough, in November,, Fan Jiang, who, if you’re not familiar with, I’ll explain him.

He’s, he’s an important guy. He was announced as the new head of domestic e commerce and international e commerce, which is what he was running before. Now, those who aren’t [00:05:00] familiar, this is, I’m kind of dating myself here., seven years ago, eight years ago, everybody was following Fan Jiang. In China, he was the young hotshot within Alibaba.

He was running Taobao and Tmall and Alimama, you know, he was, and that’s the engine of this company. Domestic e commerce is the biggest engine by far. He was the guy and he was 32 at the time around then he’s about 39 now, you know So he was kind of the young gun like the other big young guns in e commerce are like Colin Huang Founder of Pinduoduo, you could put Zhang Yiming in there the founder of ByteDance because they’re getting into e commerce you know, these are the young guys in their early 30s who are at the top of the game and So he was the one and he got elevated to the partnership which is a big deal.

Okay. And then there was a bit of what we would call a scandal in [00:06:00] China, which I think a lot of the world would not consider a scandal. There was something of an affair between him and a prominent live streamer and he’s a married man and adultery is, is a full scandal. In China, like, well, public adultery, I guess, you know, if, if a prominent CEO turns out to be having an affair,, they are often removed now in other countries, it wouldn’t move the needle in China.

It does. So anyways, there’s something going on there. You can look up the history. If you want the young hotshot, the rising star of Alibaba sort of gets sidelined., he’s. Demoted off the partnership,, team, although I think he’s, he was moved back up not too long after, I don’t know when he got moved back up and he was basically, you know, sent out to run international e commerce, which.

From a GMV perspective is going out to the boonies. You know, you’re not in Hangzhou where the action is running the biggest business you’re, you’re in Southeast [00:07:00] Asia, Lazada is under you, Daraz is under you, now Trendyol would be under so the international business, although you know, they’ve been doing well.

Okay. If you’ve been paying attention to the numbers of Alibaba the last year, the standout star has been AIDC, which is their international e commerce business. That’s the number that’s really been moving. The biggest growth and it’s been moving the numbers, sort of the whole company. That’s Fan Jiang.

So, when he was brought back and we merged international with domestic and this guy took over, everyone’s like, oh, it’s the young, it’s the hotshot running international. But. You know, if you haven’t been around a long enough, you, you might not remember it. No, there was a previous story of him and it’s, the joke is it’s like the movie gladiator where the most famous general, you know, that movie, the most famous general is exiled and then goes [00:08:00] off and becomes a gladiator in the arena and then fights his way back and comes back to Rome.

You know, that’s kind of fun. John, a little bit. So anyways, that’s the story that’s going on. But the way I look at this is, okay, that’s, as of November, right? Everything’s in place. Now the reorganization, it’s in place, but you got to know who’s sitting in the chairs, the people sitting in the chairs. We know who they are now.

It’s Joe Tsai, chairman, Eddie Wu, CEO and head of Alibaba cloud. And now Fan Jiang, head of all e commerce. And actually, if you want to be technical about it, there was an announcement in December where the head of Ant, which is a separate group,, the Ant group president,, basically Eric Jing, who is CEO of Ant stepped away in December.

Now you have,, basically the finance chief, Cyril Han is taking over, but okay. It’s a separate company. Not going to talk [00:09:00] about, but there’s been some other ones as well changes, but those are the big ones. Net net for all of that. The A team is in place, not just the A team. You know, these are the wartime CEOs.

These are hardcore. Like I like all of them. And then if you look one level under, you can see people like,, you know, William doing CTO of Lazada. I mean, it’s, it’s a good team. Like it looks good. So, 2025 I’m kind of excited about anyways, that’s where we are now. Based on that, we’ve been seeing some moves.

Consolidation of e commerce spinning off new retail,, signing out doesn’t look like it’s going to be its own P and L anymore. It looks like it’s going to be a supporting function for e commerce again, which is historically what it was. Anyways, that’s where we are. So, looking at this, it looks to me like there’s four big engines that are happening.

Uh, engine number one, trying [00:10:00] to reignite the growth in the now reorganized and restaffed e commerce business. That’s domestic and international. That’s Fan Jiang. You know, domestic e commerce in China has slowed significantly. It’s not what it was five years ago. But the international wing, there’s a lot of growth there.

That’s one of their biggest growth runways is Let’s go into Europe. Let’s go into Spain, which they’re doing France. Big target. Let’s go to Southeast Asia. Let’s go buy trendy all in Turkey. I mean, the world’s a big place. So, there’s a long growth path for international e commerce. So that’s kind of interesting.

Uh, they’ve consolidated. That all looks good. Fresh hippo in time. Sun art are going out new retail, which was an asset heavy e commerce model. That’s out. Well, it appears to be all entirely out., within e [00:11:00] commerce, I’m looking at a couple of things. Number one, they’re more aggressively leveraging tiny owl to do stuff in e commerce that others can’t match.

Tiny owl was going to be a standalone business unit to some degree. They have their own PNL. They sell services. No. Now they’re leveraging that into things like Lazada, Ali express. Well, actually Lazada has its own logistics unit, but Ali express for sure. To offer services others can’t match. So, if you live in Spain, France, and about 10 other countries right now, you can order on AliExpress and get your item from China guaranteed in five days for a fee of 10.

That is very hard to match. If you’re a competing e commerce company, even Shein and Temu. But if you have tiny owl, you can do that. So, they’re doing this to make basically guaranteed delivery on cross border. Cause that’s kind of a bad part of cross borders. You don’t know when [00:12:00] you’re going to get it and they can do it at a price point that others really would struggle to match and they can guarantee it.

That’s kind of how their international business took off over the last year was a lot about that tactic, which was Ali express choice. Okay. That’s all cool. I like that Cainiao is growing aggressively. Cool., they’re expanding the number of smaller merchants coming on to Taobao. Tmall’s good, higher end brands, quality brands.

As you go into Taobao, you can get to SMEs and even micro enterprises, solopreneurs. You know, as you move down and add lots and lots of smaller and smaller merchants, usually that brings the price point for your goods down. They sell cheaper. Now, that’s problematic unless you have so many good tools you can give them [00:13:00] that they can become viable merchants and brands with two people in a warehouse.

So, they’re building out all the tools and they’re bringing on smaller merchants. That’s all cool. And then the other thing they’re doing, which I like, is they’re starting to leverage generative AI, both to empower merchants, a lot of content creation, business insights, but also to improve the shopping experience for customers.

And they’re putting a lot of emphasis in there. You should watch for ding talk to be a big thing there. You know, chatbots are not going to be that exciting. There’s going to be a lot there. So that’s kind of engine number one. E commerce looks refocused, reorganized, and restaffed., and they’re pretty lean and mean, you know, they’ve got a pretty good playbook.

Um, I like that their asset light again. I like that they’re not doing retail themselves, that they’re just offering basically working with third [00:14:00] party and being the connector again. So, yeah, anyways, I think that’s all pretty cool. That’s engine number one. Engine number two, they are accelerating the build out of their global smart logistics network.

Now. We get press releases fairly regularly that don’t usually get much attention. Like Cainiao has opened a new smart warehouse in Barcelona or something like that. They are building out the network. What they do in the strategy is you build out the warehouses first, then the lines connect them, the trucking lines and the plane lines.

As you build out the network, your throughput. So, they do something special, like they offer Ally express choice, which is going to generate more orders and more throughput. And that’s what you want. Increasing volume throughput going through the network. And then you expand and push the [00:15:00] network as much as you can.

The more nodes you have in your network lets you be faster and cheaper and offer more locations. So, you want to, you want warehouses everywhere. So that’s what they’re doing now within the network. They actually have a couple networks. They have their supply chain network, which is connecting Chinese consumers with the world.

They have express delivery within China, local to local shipping and delivery. Mostly what we’re talking about today is express delivery that’s cross border. So, the biggest access cross border would be China to the world, China to Europe, China to Southeast Asia, to some degree, China to the U. S. But when you start doing cross border, you can then do other axes.

You can do Southeast Asia to Europe. You can do Latin America to Europe. You can do other axes, but about 50 percent of the GMV right now is China to Europe and a couple other [00:16:00] places, but that cross border piece is really cool. So, when they’re opening these new trade routes, airplane flights,, trucking routes, warehouses, you’re basically seeing the express delivery network build out cross border.

What comes after, and they will use their domestic scale in China to basically offer a cross border service that no one can match, right? They’ve got a scale advantage in terms of throughput, volume, and tech spending. Domestically, they’ll lever that into a cross border access from China into, say, Europe.

Then they will build out the warehouses in Europe, and they’ll do the same game. The next version of this game will, they will start going local to local. In these other markets, so they will do Europe to Europe and France to France, like they do China to China. So, the domestic scale gives them an advantage to go cross border and building out their [00:17:00] network and volume.

The cross-border network will give them an advantage to build local to local in Southeast Asia and Europe are kind of the big targets. So, all of that, that’s what I would call a winning strategy. Now, on top of that, what they will do is they will outspend everybody. Pretty much on the planet in R and D and tech development, because they’re not just building a global network with high throughput and high density, lots of nodes in a geographic area.

They’re also going to build the tech and automation tools and then deploy those in all their warehouses and trucks and robot vehicles and all that everywhere., that is going to be very hard to match because they have a massive scale advantage there. Amazon could match them, maybe FedEx and a couple others could match them, but there’s only a couple companies on the planet who can match them there.

So, all of that to me, that looks like a winning [00:18:00] strategy in terms of using your scale to get more scale. But really the other part of that piece is, you’ve got to use your scale, your tech, to offer a differentiated service that others can’t match. That’s what AliExpress Choice is. They used the fact that they had Cainiao to offer a service from China to Spain and 10 other countries.

That basically no one can match easily. Like we can guarantee you 5-day delivery for 10 or we guarantee you 10-day delivery for 5. They can only do that because of their capabilities. So, you want to lever your scale, your capabilities into a service that others can’t match. And I basically heard the head of Cainiao say exactly what I’m saying, you know, they go for scale advantages and then they offer differentiated services.

That’s what they’re doing now within all of that. And you can go look up [00:19:00] all their tech. I’ve put pictures up all over my website about. You know, the little automated robots and the express lines and the warehouses and all of this. Those of you who have come on the tours with us, you know, we went to tiny out, we saw all their tech.

We’ve gone to JD similar tech. You can go to their smart warehouses. It’s all pretty cool. The big question mark within all of that. That is probably last mile delivery. All the things I just said that there are advantages, none of those really help you with last mile until they can get automated delivery vehicles or drones or smart lockers.

When you start talking last mile delivery, you’re talking about dudes on scooters and trucks and they don’t have any advantages there. So, I, you know, if I’m talking to say a logistics company in Europe, they’re concerned with how we compete with this because we know they’re coming. We know they’re doing cross border now, but they’re coming [00:20:00] and they’re going to do local to local express delivery.

And my answer to that is always like, they can’t beat you on last mile delivery. Everyone has the same situation, but they will beat you on the core warehouse network. So, what you need to do is okay, match them in the core network as much as you can, and then put on top of that differentiated local services like marketing services in France,, custom packaging for French consumers from French brands.

You’re going to play on the local services level because you’re not going to beat them on the core network level. And there’s a good strategy for that. You can actually win as a local express delivery company in Europe., but you got to kind of know how it’s going to play out over the next couple of years.

All right. That is number two, which was basically, let me read it again. I expect tiny out to accelerate the build [00:21:00] out of their global smart logistics network. Beginning with cross border express delivery, but then going into other axes, not just China to Europe or Southeast Asia, and then local to local will be after that.

Okay, let’s move on to engine number three, which is pretty much my favorite topic in all of tech right now, which is Alibaba cloud. Well, Baidu cloud and Alibaba cloud are kind of my top two. They’re making big investments in Alibaba cloud. And they are going to very aggressively push adoption, which probably means more price cuts.

They did slash their prices pretty significantly,, several months ago. Yeah, they’ve got to get adoption. Cloud is a massive opportunity in China, Asia. In Asia, Alibaba cloud is arguably number one ahead of AWS, Azure, Google cloud. Although you do have to kind of Your kind [00:22:00] of have to break that apart. You have to look at what they’re actually doing.

And really you’re talking a lot of infrastructure as a service stuff. So basic connectivity and compute services. That’s not quite the same thing that AWS is doing, say, in the U. S. So, it’s not apples to apples. But anyways, big investments in Alibaba Cloud. This has been difficult to get adoption. It’s been slow.

Much slower than I think people thought. If you look at AWS, you know, it’s a monster. And it’s throwing off cash. Amazon’s doing great. Cloud and B2B services in China, Asia are quite a bit behind the West. B2C in this part of the world is faster, more aggressive, more advanced. E commerce is better in China than is in the US by a lot.

But not the enterprise and the B2B stuff. You know, they haven’t been building ERP systems since 1985, so [00:23:00] adoption is slow, the companies are often less developed. So, Alibaba Cloud hasn’t really been a rocket ship. But, they’ve got to get adoption. They’ve got to get people. The other stuff they’re going to do, engine number four is AI services to start selling AI services beyond just merchants on your e commerce platform.

If you want to be general AI services, that is really a B2B business and you’ve got to get them on cloud first. That’s how most businesses are buying AI services. They go to their cloud provider and they start there. They might customize it, they might build their own eventually, but that’s step number one.

So, yeah, it’s clear, I mean, when I talked to the head of Alibaba Cloud a couple months ago, yeah, it’s clear that they’re prioritizing market share growth over profitability right now., you know, the price cuts they did on their core cloud services, [00:24:00] you know, up to 50%. So that’s where they’re going.

And additionally, they’re investing big in this area. Like it’s a changing tech paradigm. So, they’re not just trying to be a cloud service provider. They want to be the next tech paradigm going forward., so watch for big investments, watch for a lot of acquisitions, and then they’ll try to sort of go for a wider range of clients.

Cloud services, you, you generally want the big clients, but you know, they have a ton of merchants on their e commerce platforms already. So you go for smaller merchants, smaller brands. Now the interesting question for them, I think is, okay, they’ve got China, fantastic. We know they want Asia, huge strategic priority.

Where else do they want? Now, if I had to guess, I would say they want Europe, [00:25:00] but e commerce is not terribly political. Cloud can get kind of political pretty quickly. You know, can you sell Alibaba or Baidu or Huawei cloud services to major banks in Germany that they’re going to run their core transactions on?

I think people are going to have somewhat of a political question there. Can they do Alibaba cloud for merchants? In France that are using various, yeah, probably e commerce is probably okay. So, there’s going to be a political question over this and I’m not sure where they’re going after Southeast Asia.

So, if I had to guess, I’d say Europe is their number one target if they can make it work. After that, it’s probably Latin America. We’re really talking Brazil and Mexico, but we’ll see. Anyways, that is engine number three. Let’s get to the last one, which is kind of my favorite. Well. The most exciting right now, [00:26:00] which is pioneering new and game changing generative AI services.

So, the examples I gave you so far, we’re like, okay, we’re going to give merchants on Taobao, gen AI tools that let them do content creation, that let them do marketing, that let them do product descriptions, things like that. Maybe we let them use a digital avatar by which they can start to interact with customers more directly.

Fine. Those tools are all good. Let’s say we’re giving them business intelligence, sort of advisory ai, which is what they’re doing for Alibaba. Cloud or alibaba.com. If you want to go cross border and you’re a medium company, you can go on alibaba.com and basically the business advisor will do an analysis of a foreign market for you, tell you what to [00:27:00] do in that market, what types of products, all that sort of stuff.

That’s a pretty cool tool. I would think those are all good and they’re all new things and it turns out cross border e commerce has really cool use cases for AI,, different languages for the customers,, product descriptions, things like that. Usually, cross border means you have a management and staffing situation between two countries.

Uh, those people have a hard time communicating with each other. Lazada and Shopee. You know, they’ve got staff in, I don’t know, eight countries that have to be on daily or weekly calls about what they’re doing. Well, most of them don’t speak the same language the most fluently. So, AI tools let you do that, which is what they’re using it for.

Okay. I would put all of those tools as cool. I don’t think they’re game changers. What I’m looking for is for Alibaba, [00:28:00] and this gets to Eddie Wu, for Alibaba to launch completely new AI services. that change the game. 10X products like robot taxis would be an example of this. Robo taxis are a game changer.

That is an AI service. It’s just an AI in a machine with wheels. Personal assistant robots in the home. That’s a game changer. That I would characterize as an AI service as well. What are the game changing AI services that they’re going to lean into? And I think this is the Eddie Wu big question. So, here’s what I’m kind of looking for.

They are definitely trying to own the whole tech stack for AI. They’re building their own foundation models. They’re doing quite well. If you go to Hugging Face in these rankings and you look at how many people are using QN, it’s doing quite well. [00:29:00] So they’re in the game to be one of the major providers internationally for foundation models, LLMs, multimodal, all that.

And they’re going all the way down to the chips. I mean, they design their own semiconductors., that’s sort of number one for them. Number two, they’re using Gen AI to enhance their existing products. That’s kind of what I mentioned, the e commerce, they levered into cloud, they levered into e commerce.

That gets you some efficiency, you get new features. user experiences are new, good, fine, fine, fine. But it’s, you know, these new AI powered products and services. This is what I’m looking for. And they’ve mentioned one so far, which was sort of mid last year, where they talked about Ding Talk. Now, Ding Talk is their version of WeChat, which they kind of relate to the game, when WeChat was dominant in China.

To their credit, they basically realized we’re kind of late [00:30:00] to this game, so they didn’t go after B2C communications, C2C communications. They basically created it like an enterprise tool, like Slack. And sure enough, Ding Talk has done quite well on the enterprise side, such that WeWork, I’m sorry, WeChat, eventually came after them with WeChat Work.

So, Ding Talk is sort of this enterprise service, internal communication, if you ever want to visit Alibaba. You always got to download ding talk because that’s how you set up communication with everybody who works there. You can’t really say, hey, I’m in WeChat, although you can, but I mean, it’s not great form.

Okay. So, the first service they talked about was what they call the ding talk AI assistant. Now this looks just like a, it looks like their first AI assistant tool. You know, people are rolling this out like ant financial, you know, they have an AI service That’s a doctor that you can ask medical questions.

[00:31:00] They have another one that’s a personal assistant that you can order stuff like get me a pizza, pay my water bill thing. So, everyone’s rolling out these AI agents really. DingTalk AI assistant is their first one. It’s a full-fledged AI agent. I think they’re going to be rolling out agents like crazy in 2025.

And I think DingTalk is going to be their sort of foundational model for doing that. They’re going to turn that into a whole suite of agents could be a human resources agent could be a lawyer It could be someone to take care of your kids and teach them I think they’re going to do all of that now at the same time because they’re Alibaba They launched a marketplace which they’re calling the agent marketplace.

I mean who’s better at marketplaces than Alibaba So they’re going to have a marketplace where you can buy and rent agents for whatever you need. And within that marketplace, they’ll have their Ding Talk [00:32:00] AI agents. So, they want to have the primary service and they want to be the marketplace where everyone else deploys their agents and you can pick and choose which one you want.

That was kind of the first new AI service that they launched that got my attention, but I’m looking for these big moves. And when Eddie Wu gave his first sort of quarterly earnings commentary, he was very specific. Like he said, we are focusing on platform business models and new AI services, right? And you could argue those are the two most attractive business models that exist.

Platform business models, which everyone’s been talking about for 20 years. Awesome. You know, that’s my joke is that’s the lion on the Savannah. It’s the best animal there. AI services. That’s the tiger. This might be as good or maybe a better business model than a digital platform. According to Eddie, that’s what they’re focused on. [00:33:00]

So that’s all impressive. Anyways, that’s where we are. Those are kind of my four points., hopefully that’s helpful. I’ll put the list in the show notes if you want to, well, I’ll repeat it again here really quick. So, number one, reigniting growth in a now reorganized, restaffed e commerce business., number two, accelerating the build out of the global smart logistics network, starting with cross border express delivery.

Number three, big investments in Alibaba cloud with price cuts and other incentives to push adoption. And then number three, pioneering new and game changing AI generative AI really services. And that is the content for today. As for me, I’m,, finishing up here in Paris. I’m going to the airport in a couple hours.

flying back to Asia. So, it’s,, that’s both great and sort of a little bit of a downer because one, I love Asia and it’s my favorite place. And it, and it is cold in [00:34:00] Paris. It was like two degrees, a little bit of snow last night, which I’m not built for anymore, but. It’s been a spectacular week. Like, it’s been one of the best weeks ever.

Uh, lots of cool people, you know, dinners, all these restaurants I didn’t know about. I mean, Paris is an awesome place for restaurants. People always talk about cafes. Ooh, sit in the cafe. That’s okay, because they’re pretty. And, you know, they’re historic, and that’s nice. But it’s really the restaurants. I mean, the, the menus are spectacular.

It’s, it’s, its Queensland city, which I don’t really know. Cause I’m not a food guy, you know, met up with a bunch of people and it seems like everyone we met up with like, oh, let’s take, let’s go out to dinner. Man. So many good restaurants in one week. I literally don’t want to eat anymore. I’m going to stop eating for like a while.

I’m just bloated., but had a great time going to different neighborhoods, finding all these restaurants, hanging out,, met some great people. I didn’t know before,, not really. it. Hey, that [00:35:00] was awesome. Thanks for coming out and walking around. It was great to chat and, yeah, that was really good. So appreciated that.

Yeah. I’ve having a great time. So anyways, a little bittersweet, but I’m going to be coming back here a lot. That was sort of my, my conclusion about halfway through, which is okay. I’m moving my life part time to Paris every year. Like decision made. That’s it. Like I just texted, you know, the girlfriend. I’m like, look, executive decision.

We’re spending several months in Paris every year. Let’s just, it’s just going to get dialed in. So, I guess that was a bit of a decision for the week. Yeah. Spectacularly good time. Anyways, that’s it. So, I’m heading out to the airport here. A couple, well, probably in 20 minutes here. Anyways, that’s it for me.

I hope this is helpful and I will talk to you next week. Bye bye.

——

I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

My book series Moats and Marathons is one-of-a-kind framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital businesses.

Note: This content (articles, podcasts, website info) is not investment advice. The information and opinions from me and any guests may be incorrect. The numbers and information may be wrong. The views expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Investing is risky. Do your own research.