AI as a Catalyst for Supply Chain and Workforce Transformation – with Kuo Zhang of Alibaba.com

Small companies and enterprises alike are operating into related roadblocks in the case of deploying AI at scale and creating resilience in at this time’s world provide chains. While many leaders perceive the urgency, their organizations typically face structural, cultural, and logistical boundaries to implementation.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Business Pulse Survey, 38.8% of all U.S. small companies reported home provider delays in a given current week, and 64.6% of small producers did so. Among manufacturing small enterprises, 39% mentioned they anticipated to wish new provide chain choices inside six months.

Meanwhile, an OECD survey found that solely 18% of SMEs are conscious of authorities assist schemes for adopting digital instruments, pointing to a hanging hole in readiness. In the U.S., the Department of Commerce found that whereas solely 3% of companies reported utilizing AI, over 40% admitted they confronted no boundaries — but nonetheless had not adopted it.

These pressures of disruption, under-utilized know-how, and labor constraints are exactly what Alibaba.com President Kuo Zhang addressed in an interview following his keynote speech at CoCreate 2025 in Las Vegas. 

In an unique dialog with Emerj Editorial Director Matthew DeMello, Zhang describes how enterprises and SMBs alike can be leveraging the identical AI instruments — agentic AI, provider knowledge platforms, and extra — to grab new strategic benefits, unlock new markets, and reply to persistent volatility within the world provide chain.

This article breaks down actionable takeaways from their dialog for retail and logistics leaders in two vital areas of AI adoption: 

• Embedding AI KPIs into worker roles accelerates adoption: Assigning measurable AI targets throughout departments ensures adoption is just not siloed and doubles the speed of innovation and thought execution.
• Leveraging provider diversification as a resilience software: Utilizing AI-driven sourcing platforms to increase and pivot provider networks allows enterprises to resist disruptions, such as tariffs and pandemics, whereas remaining aggressive.

Guest: Kuo Zhang, President of Alibaba.com

Expertise: Global Trade, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Supply Chains

Brief Recognition: Kuo has served as President of Alibaba.com since 2017, the place he leads the corporate’s efforts to empower small and medium-sized companies with digital instruments and AI-driven sourcing platforms. With a background spanning senior management roles at Taobao and Tmall, as properly as earlier expertise at Microsoft and IBM, he brings over 15 years of experience in world commerce and know-how innovation. A graduate of Tsinghua University, Kuo is a acknowledged voice in digital commerce and a frequent speaker on how AI is remodeling provide chain resilience and SMB competitiveness.

Embedding AI KPIs into Employee Roles Accelerates Adoption

When organizations discuss AI adoption, the dialog typically defaults to know-how groups, pilot initiatives, or top-down digital transformation methods. Yet, as Alibaba.com President Kuo Zhang makes clear, essentially the most life like engine of AI integration for enterprise leaders lies in the way it touches each position inside the enterprise. Rather than treating AI as a separate initiative confined to engineers or innovation labs, Alibaba.com has tied the use of AI on to worker efficiency metrics.

“Each and each worker in Alibaba has an OKR or KPI for AI… engineering, gross sales, advertising and marketing — all can leverage AI in several methods. By utilizing AI, you may write a lot code than earlier than — twice the code. Every quarter, now we have about 300 concepts. Only 100 might be utilized earlier than, however with AI, we are able to now implement 200 or extra.”

— Kuo Zhang, President of Alibaba.com

This construction ensures that experimentation with AI is just not an optionally available additional however a measurable accountability for each employee. It implies that salespeople are anticipated to find methods AI can streamline outreach and cut back administrative burdens, entrepreneurs should combine AI to enhance marketing campaign testing or content material manufacturing, and engineers are tasked with utilizing AI to speed up code growth.

For executives, the lesson is simple however profound: AI adoption can’t stay summary. By embedding AI KPIs into each worker’s targets, leaders rework AI from a distant IT initiative into a each day productiveness software. The technique Zhang describes right here fosters accountability, ensures that AI is just not ignored on the particular person stage, and cultivates an organizational tradition the place innovation is a collective accountability.

The outcomes at Alibaba.com reveal compounding good points. Engineers execute extra initiatives. Sales groups give attention to deeper buyer relationships. Marketers scale inventive testing with out increasing headcount. By embedding AI targets into efficiency constructions, Zhang notes that provide chain leaders can flip AI from an experiment into an engine of measurable, repeatable progress.

Leveraging Supplier Diversification as a Resilience Tool

Zhang notes the previous decade has been marked by financial shocks, together with the pandemic, geopolitical instability, provide chain disruptions, and shifting tariffs. Each of these occasions created widespread turbulence for world commerce. For many enterprises, these disruptions have been existential threats; for others, they grew to become alternatives to adapt and strengthen. Kuo Zhang emphasizes that the distinction lies not within the scale of disruption, however in how successfully companies can diversify their provider bases utilizing know-how:

“The basic precept of enterprise is demand and provide. You have demand, and that you must discover essentially the most environment friendly suppliers to meet it. What is available in between is know-how — how one can ship sooner, how to save cash. But in the beginning and finish, it at all times comes again to demand and provide, and how the system retains transferring.”

— Kuo Zhang, President of Alibaba.com

For SMBs, know-how lowers the boundaries to coming into world markets by automating belief mechanisms, translation, funds, and logistics. Zhang describes how Alibaba.com’s commerce assurance platform helps consumers execute safe transactions, whereas its digital logistics providers simplify cross-border success. These instruments cut back the frictions that after made world sourcing prohibitively tough for smaller gamers. For enterprises, the identical applied sciences act as resilience levers, making it simpler to check, undertake, and pivot amongst suppliers in response to exterior shocks.

Zhang notes that these resilience lever capabilities grew to become significantly clear through the pandemic. Many firms found their provider networks have been too concentrated, leaving them uncovered to region-specific disruptions. Similarly, tariffs can abruptly make a beforehand cost-effective provider community unsustainable. In Zhang’s view, the answer is to not predict the following disruption, however to make use of AI-driven sourcing platforms to take care of optionality. If tariffs or rules make one area much less aggressive, know-how allows a fast transition to a different. If transportation delays have an effect on one provider, diversified networks enable companies to proceed fulfilling demand.

The energy of provider diversification is obvious in Alibaba.com’s progress. Zhang goes on to say that order quantity on the platform has elevated by greater than 30% year-over-year, with demand persevering with to speed up into the autumn of 2025. The surge displays companies of all sizes more and more counting on digital provide chains to navigate uncertainty.

For executives, the takeaway is that resilience is now not nearly redundancy or backup plans. It is about constructing techniques that make adaptation routine. Leveraging platforms that mixture provider knowledge, automate communication, and present belief infrastructure allows enterprises to view provider diversification as a strategic software fairly than a last-resort measure.

Before closing his dialogue with Emerj, Zhang highlights a longer-term development: inside commerce inside areas, such as Europe, is commonly two to 3 occasions bigger than exterior commerce. Inter-regional commerce considered in such a approach, he insists, reveals vital untapped alternatives for SMEs to compete internationally. By reducing boundaries, know-how not solely helps enterprises hedge in opposition to volatility but in addition expands their market attain.