Signage on the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. sales space on the Good China Expo in Chongqing, China, on Monday, Sept. 4, 2023.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
Alibaba must be “person first” and “AI-driven,” new CEO Eddie Wu informed staff on Tuesday, as he laid out the strategic priorities for the Chinese language tech large.
Wu, who’s simply three days into the job as Alibaba chief government, known as for the e-commerce agency to “undertake a start-up mindset” as he seems to steer the corporate again to development following one of the tumultuous instances in its 24-year historical past.
“Occasions are altering, and so should Alibaba! Because the world progresses, Alibaba must evolve even sooner!,” Wu mentioned in a letter to staff that was seen by CNBC.
Wu, certainly 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 position to concentrate on heading up the cloud computing enterprise. Nevertheless, 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 totally different enterprise teams, the most important shakeup in its historical past.
Wu mentioned Alibaba’s two principal strategic focuses will probably 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 rivals. This can be a totally different method from Alibaba which has tended to attempt to maintain customers inside its ecosystem of merchandise.
Wu additionally touted the necessity to spend money on synthetic intelligence. Alibaba’s cloud unit has tried to place itself as a frontrunner in AI inside China because it seems to reignite development within the enterprise.
“Every of our companies generates huge numbers of use circumstances; subsequently, we should rework these use circumstances into purposes for AI know-how, driving breakthrough person expertise and enterprise fashions by way of know-how innovation,” Wu mentioned.
“If we do not sustain with the adjustments of the AI period, we will probably be displaced.”
Alibaba Cloud has its giant language mannequin known as Tongyi Qianwen, launched earlier this yr. An LLM is an AI mannequin skilled on enormous quantities of information and underpins chatbot purposes. It is the identical sort of mannequin that OpenAI’s ChatGPT relies on.
Wu additionally mentioned Alibaba must proceed to spend money on “globalization.”
Alibaba may even look to advertise youthful expertise. Throughout the subsequent 4 years, the corporate will promote these born after 1985 and the Nineteen Nineties “to type the core of our enterprise administration groups,” Wu mentioned.
