Signage on the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. sales space on the Sensible China Expo in Chongqing, China, on Monday, Sept. 4, 2023.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Photographs
Alibaba must be “person first” and “AI-driven,” new CEO Eddie Wu advised workers on Tuesday, as he laid out the strategic priorities for the Chinese language tech big.
Wu, who’s simply three days into the job as Alibaba chief govt, referred to as for the e-commerce agency to “undertake a start-up mindset” as he appears to steer the corporate again to development following one of the crucial tumultuous occasions in its 24-year historical past.
“Instances are altering, and so should Alibaba! Because the world progresses, Alibaba must evolve even sooner!,” Wu mentioned in a letter to workers that was seen by CNBC.
Wu, considered one of Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s shut confidants, began as CEO on Sept. 10, taking up from Daniel Zhang, who stepped down from the function to concentrate on heading up the cloud computing enterprise. Nonetheless, in a shock transfer, Zhang this week give up as CEO of the cloud enterprise with Wu taking up within the interim.
It comes months after Alibaba cut up its firm into six completely different enterprise teams, the most important shakeup in its historical past.
Wu mentioned Alibaba’s two most important strategic focuses might be “person first” and “AI-driven.” The corporate will “reinforce” its strategic investments in three areas.
The primary it calls “technology-driven web platforms.” Wu mentioned that Alibaba’s enterprise ought to “hunt down essentially the most open and collaborative relationships,” even with opponents. This can be a completely different strategy from Alibaba which has tended to attempt to maintain customers inside its ecosystem of merchandise.
Wu additionally touted the necessity to put money into synthetic intelligence. Alibaba’s cloud unit has tried to place itself as a frontrunner in AI inside China because it appears to reignite development within the enterprise.
“Every of our companies generates huge numbers of use circumstances; subsequently, we should remodel these use circumstances into functions for AI know-how, driving breakthrough person expertise and enterprise fashions by know-how innovation,” Wu mentioned.
“If we do not sustain with the modifications of the AI period, we might be displaced.”
Alibaba Cloud has its massive language mannequin referred to as Tongyi Qianwen, launched earlier this yr. An LLM is an AI mannequin educated on big quantities of knowledge and underpins chatbot functions. It is the identical kind of mannequin that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is predicated on.
Wu additionally mentioned Alibaba must proceed to put money into “globalization.”
Alibaba may even look to advertise youthful expertise. Inside the subsequent 4 years, the corporate will promote these born after 1985 and the Nineties “to type the core of our enterprise administration groups,” Wu mentioned.