How Chinese Businesses Expand Personalization via AI

10 Jul 2026 · 3 min · 3 chapters

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In short

Whether Chinese businesses are better at AI-driven hyper-personalization, with a focus on industry-specific use cases and B2B marketing at scale.

Guest backgrounds

Chris Tang, CMO of Alibaba (conversation about Alibaba’s AI for vendors).

Key claims

Chinese firms are “probably” more advanced/focused on industry-specific hyper-personalization, especially in healthcare and B2B marketing. Alibaba uses AI to help the hundreds of millions of vendors create marketing assets they can’t afford to produce manually.

Notable examples

A vendor selling 50 mug types can use Alibaba AI to generate images and descriptions for the remaining 45 types beyond the top-selling five, enabling scaled personalization.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Chinese Advancements in AI Hyper-Personalization

0:34 to 0:50

Discussion on the superiority of Chinese businesses in hyper-personalization using AI.

“It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.”

Chinese Advancements in AI Hyper-Personalization

0:56 to 2:15

Discussion on the superiority of Chinese businesses in hyper-personalization using AI.

“Are they more advanced or more focused on that than Western counterparts?”

Chinese Advancements in AI Hyper-Personalization

2:55 to 3:10

Discussion on the superiority of Chinese businesses in hyper-personalization using AI.

“Athletic Brewing Company crafts award-winning non-alcoholic beers for those who want to be part of every round.”
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Transcript

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0:45Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. Are the Chinese better at, let's call it, hyper-personalization with AI? Are they more advanced or more focused on that than Western counterparts? So what the Chinese are better at is industry-specific hyper-personalization. Are the Chinese better at hyper-personalizing in healthcare? My answer to that would be probably yes. Are the Chinese better at hyper-personalizing in B2B marketing? My answer to that would probably be yes.

1:20So I had a conversation with Chris Tang, who's the CMO of Alibaba. And what he said is what they're using their AI for is to allow the vendors on Alibaba. So they've got a couple of hundred million vendors on Alibaba, which is basically the most dominant B2B vending site essentially in Asia. If I'm a vendor and I'm selling 50 different types of mugs to buyers, to retailers all over the world, I will never have the resources to do the marketing materials, to do all the kinds of pictures and descriptions, et cetera, for all the 50 types of mugs that I'm selling, I'd probably go to an agency and have it made for the five best-selling mugs that I have on my portfolio.

2:03What I can now do is I can use Alibaba's AI to create marketing material, images, descriptions, et cetera, for the remaining 45. And now all of a sudden, I have this scaled up, amazing personalization, which still yesterday was simply not doable. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required.

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From the publisher

How Chinese Companies Scale Personalization with AI

26 Aug 2025

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Chinese firms are using AI to hyperpersonalize at scale. But adoption comes with risks—Amit Joshi says leaders should test these tools carefully and combine them with others to drive growth.

Listen to the full IdeaCast episode here: https://s.hbr.org/4fYbeRh

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