This is a follow-up to my article on conversational AI with He Xiaodong at JD (article here, podcast here). I also spoke with Tao Mei, who is Vice President of Cloud & AI – and Technical Vice President of JD. We talked about how AI was being used in fashion, which is a fascinating topic. […]
I have been giving you lots of frameworks and concepts. And after a while, it can all get kind of confusing. Is this new software critical for my business? Is this new business model going to seriously impact our industry? Is this like Amazon disrupting retail? Is this more like Mobike, which was nice but […]
I had a good discussion interview with Arthur du Passage and Edouard de Mezerac of Artefact, a data consulting and digital marketing company. And I thought they had a really good vantage point for how AI / ML is being used on the ground in China. I’ve summarized my 3 take-aways from our discussion. […]
I had a fascinating discussion with He Xiaodong of JD. He is the head of Deep Learning, NLP and the Speech Lab. And the Deputy Managing Director of JD AI Research. I did a podcast about this called Products with Personalities (Podcast 31) but I wanted to post some of his slides from our talk. […]
In Part 1 (From Big, Dumb Bureaucracies to Zero-Human Operations (pt 1 of 2), I made the following argument: In the industrial age, enterprises were built on the advantages of scale. Companies went from workshops and small factories to big factories capable of mass production. Superior scale gave companies multiple advantages, including cost efficiencies and […]
In Part 1 (Why the #1 Business Solution to Coronavirus in China Is Live Streaming, Especially Taobao Live), I argued three big things are happening in digital China right now. Covid19 is radically altering the behavior of hundreds of millions of consumers (and businesses), resulting in what is being called the quarantine economy. Everyone is […]
There was a good paper recently published by Martin Reeves and Raj Varadajaran of the Boston Consulting Group. The paper (When Resilience Is More Important Than Efficiency) touched on a lot of issues related to digital competition – but there was one chart that I thought really hit at the center of a lot of […]
Huawei released their 2019 financial results last week. And I had the opportunity to interview Karl Song, the VP of Corporate Communications, prior so I knew what was coming (but I got embargoed). You can see that interview here. And it was fascinating. Step back and consider what a truly crazy year Huawei had. Has […]
I recently went to the WeChat Open Talk meeting and founder Allen Zhang raised some questions that have really stuck with me. He talked about about the increasingly important role of information flows in daily life and who controls this. His talk is here but my basic take-away is the below question. How do you […]
Three big things are happening in digital China right now. The coronavirus is radically altering the behavior of hundreds of millions of consumers (and businesses), resulting in what is being called the quarantine economy. Everyone is trying to move from in-person to digital interactions. This shift to digital interactions is supercharging and rapidly evolving China’s […]