00:05

Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from Agentic Org Now, which is the new name for the business. I'll explain that shortly.  And the topic for today,  fun things we learned in our first Alibaba e-commerce training program,  which we just finished up a couple of weeks ago in Hangzhou, but really we've been working on this for seven or eight months and we had a month worth of classes.

00:34

Online and in person and then that was phase one phase two. We took the team the attendees We took them to Hangzhou spend a week there more training Fantastic. It was we sort of finished up the first Version of this program, which is a partnership between me and Alibaba mostly and we're going to be rolling this out to other places So I want to kind of talk about what we learned and really the fun stuff I talked about some of the lessons before in a previous podcast. I kind of want to just talk about it and

01:04

the fun stuff. We had a great time. It was a lot of fun. So, I'm going to sort of go through that for today.  Let's see.  disclaimers.  Nothing in this podcast or writing or website is investment advice and numbers and information for me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate.  Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let's get into the topic.

01:32

Let me talk a little bit about the name change first. And it's not just a name change. We are changing about 70 % of the business, what we do. And it's really a result of two things. First one is, look,  becoming an agentic first organization, an agentic first business, it is priority number one, number two, and number three. It is such a sea change in how you operate.

01:59

I think literally every business needs to be doing this right now. You should focus on this all the time. Now within that becoming an agentic first organization, I think agentic commerce, which is why I'm spending a lot of time in Alibaba, is the white hot center. If you're selling anything online, you need a team of agents. You just do, or you're going to find yourself not being able to compete very soon. So I think it's just the highest priority. So we're focused on that.

02:28

What I would argue is the future of business, when we talk about business, we sort of take things for granted. We will look at a company and say big company, small company. We'll talk about headcount because the fundamental unit of a business has been number of humans. So this is a big company, 10,000 employees. This is a smaller company, 50 employees. I don't think that's the fundamental unit of business anymore. I think the fundamental unit is how many agents do you have running?

02:58

That's number one. The number two factor, I think, was the number of humans. Number three factor is probably number of robots.  That's what a business operation looks like now, increasingly, and I think that's the future.  So you got to start transforming to an agentic first organization. And what we're doing is shifting to basic, like instead of doing studies, instead of writing documents, we're saying, look, we are helping you become an agentic organization right now. And our primary service is something we call Launchpad.

03:28

where we basically meet with businesses for two days, 48 hours. We identify where they are in terms of their AI and agentic capabilities. Now we prioritize the game plan. We make the decisions.  Here are the three initiatives that need to be launched and they are launched before anyone can leave the room. That's kind of our tagline.  We launch the three to four high priority agentic initiatives before anyone's allowed to leave the room.

03:58

That means knowing why this makes sense. That's a strategy question.  Who's the team leader? Who's accountable for what? What are the milestones? What are the action plans? So we're sort of doing these high impact, very fast sessions with businesses, which we call the Launchpad, the agentic Launchpad. And it's about take action right now. Don't write documents. Don't come up with plans. Don't debate it for a quarter.

04:27

get everyone together, 48 hours, we launch. And now you'll iterate a bit and you'll try things, but that's kind of the way to do it. Anyway, so that's kind of the primary service. Hence we call it Agentic Org Now, and the primary service is basically the Agentic Org Now launch pad, which is a service. Okay, that's kind of what we're doing. I'll go into this in more detail later this week, I think.  Now the backend story of that, which is not really relevant for clients and partners, but...

04:56

You know, consulting is changing. I think the consulting I was trained to do and have been doing for decades now, I think it's going away to a significant extent because knowledge has been democratized.  You know, I used to tell people, look, there's two types of consulting. There's the radiologist and there's the dentist. The radiologist is a pure knowledge worker. Looks at the film, writes the report. Here's what's in the film.

05:24

100 % knowledge. The dentist is kind of, yeah, there's a lot of specialized knowledge. Here's what we were going to do with your teeth, like a radiologist, but then 50 % of it, and now I'm going to drill into your teeth and do it. So 50 % action and implementation,  50 % knowledge. Okay, we're all shifting to the second. We're all becoming dentists now. We study a problem, we figure out what's the best thing to do, and then we help you implement.

05:52

And here's the thing, most AI and agentic programs at businesses fail.  70%, 80%, why? It's not the technology, it's the people and the organization and the skills and get it's all that sort of hands-on, let's work inside the organization to get the systems to change. It's not about choosing the right tech. That part's actually kind of easy.  So anyways, that's the back end of why we're doing this.

06:20

Okay, I won't go into this beyond that for this podcast, but I'll do a full podcast on why we're doing this.  so service number one, which we're doing is the Launchpad, the Agentic Launchpad.  If you want to know more about that, go over to agendicorgnow.com or go over to Tecmo Consulting. We still have that domain too, but we're kind of going to retire the word consulting over time.  But two other services we do, we do the China Tours, which I've talked about, and then we have this

06:50

training program for e-commerce entrepreneurs,  which we call the of the Alibaba e-commerce training program. And we just finished the first one. So again, it's all about impact. So I'm going to talk about sort of what we learned on the first iteration of this program and what's coming next. And by the way, I'm looking for partners. If this is of interest to you,  we're looking to roll this out.  Brazil, Turkey,  Indonesia.

07:19

maybe Mexico, but we're really open to any geography. Sri Lanka might make a lot of sense. Anyways, if you're interested, we need local partners because we're not there. But if you're interested in that, give me a call and we'll talk about it. Okay. So let me get into what we learned on this program, which was fantastic. I think this was a huge success.  And you can see I'm replacing traditional consulting with Launchpad services that are agent-focused.

07:49

And I'm kind of replacing my old role as a professor, you know, at PKU or CEIBS or I've taught a bit at Cambridge Business School. I'm kind of replacing the professor hat with basically e-commerce training for entrepreneurs.  Now this program,  phase one was conducted over about a month where we had seven sessions, modules that really were

08:15

a combination of sort of Alibaba thinking, because they have very well thought out, and we're partners in this, that's why I'm using their name.  Now going forward, that may or may not be the case, but this program, the phase one version of that, that was a partnership with Alibaba, hence I'm using their name. We did the core modules, which are a lot about how to think about strategy, how to come up with sort of a business plan, how to organize your people and your organization for success long-term, which is super important, by the way.

08:44

I don't really talk about the people side of this very much, the training, the organization, how you work together. It's super important. And then you get into more e-commerce meets AI questions like, what should we be doing in AI marketing, which is super important. I did a podcast on that last week or two weeks ago now. How can you be a solopreneur using agents instead of staffing up people, which by the way, totally works now.

09:12

So there was a lot of sort of frontier. We kind of combined course thinking and strategy, which was a lot of Alibaba, with frontier level stuff.  Like you got to put agents and combine them with your marketing.  Live streaming, you can use digital avatars now. You can be a solopreneur. can, I mean, literally,  you can build an apparel brand in four to six days now. You can design all the clothes.

09:41

You can have all the specs done. You can try lots of interesting types of apparel, dresses,  jackets, whatever you want.  You can create the video. You can create the marketing. That takes a day if you know the right tools to use.  You can also task that to Chinese manufacturers and have the products ready to sell in minimum, probably three days. If you're using more high-end materials like silk and wool, okay, 10 days.

10:11

But yeah, you can create an apparel brand in three to 10 days and have it ready to sell on a website in the United States with no training whatsoever in apparel. No fashion sense, no design sense. You don't need any of that anymore.  OK, that's a solopreneur thing. And we're playing with that right now. We're doing some stuff, which is really fun. So that was kind of the core of phase one. And then people graduated and they got certificates from basically Alibaba.

10:39

This is Alibaba Global Initiatives. And then phase two, okay, we took a smaller subset of that group and everyone who was in this was an entrepreneur already. We really wanted people who had been selling online for a couple years and we want to help them not go from zero to one, but go from two to five. Okay, so a smaller subset, we took about 20 people out to Hangzhou. We spent the week there, had a great time.

11:06

which was a combination of three days on site at Alibaba headquarters, which is really fun.  And then a couple days of visiting companies around town.  Hanjo is a lot of fun.  And then they went into Shanghai for a couple of days to do some shopping and more fun. I didn't really accompany them for that. I was sort of done with the content part by then. Although I may do that in the future. I was just sort of due back home, but you know, two days in Shanghai is super fun.  It's super fun.

11:36

So I probably should have done that, but I didn't have the time. That was kind of the program. And I thought I'd talk about a couple of the companies we visited. I mentioned in the last podcast, digital live streaming,  digital avatars that can live stream 24 seven. I'm probably going to spin up a little army of clones of me that create content 24 seven. I don't think it'll be live streaming. I think it'll be mostly just short video, but that's all really easy to do now. I'll probably have to do that.

12:04

because of the volume of content coming.  But outside of that, thought I'd talk about three or four things I haven't mentioned. Two companies and then two tools you can use literally right now, which are great that I don't think most people know about.  Okay, company number one, we went out to Geely,  which is own Zeekr, which is now the number three, pretty much, know, EV company in the world. Although those numbers, you got to...

12:33

Those get mixed together, hybrid and pure EV.  but in my mind, this is the BYD that the rest of the world doesn't know about yet. Everyone knows BYD coming from China. Their cars are amazing. The price points can go everything from 8,000 to $200,000.  You know, they're taking the world by storm, except for the United States who can't buy them. Okay, the BYD that people don't know about is Zeekr. Don't know about yet.

13:00

is Zeekr. Some people do, but they're not quite as well known as BYD has become.  So we went over to their headquarters and did some discussions and tours.  Geely's a really interesting company. The founder, this is one of the great entrepreneur founder stories of China, is Eric Li. His name is Li Shufu. He's the founder of Geely,  and now Zeekr.  he's got just the coolest backstory, if you haven't heard it.

13:31

He basically grew up nearby in rural Zhejiang,  near Hangzhou origin, actually from a town named Taizhou.  The entrepreneurs that came out of China in the 80s really were different because they came from such a completely different background. This is not like the entrepreneurs that emerged in the 90s, late 90s, who usually were highly educated, had gone to the West, maybe they had worked at Google and then come back and founded Baidu like Robin Lee. No, the first generation in the 80s

14:01

They came out of military background, government jobs, because there was nothing. And a lot of them came out of very poor backgrounds. And that was his background, very humble beginnings.  So he comes out of Tai-Joh, not a well-known town. Even today, it's not terribly well-known.  1986, he founds his first company, age 23, basically starts doing refrigerator parts. He starts manufacturing them.  And this

14:29

over and he went sort of from basically refrigerator parts. He started doing some decoration materials. I would call this the early years of hustling and scrambling, know, sell whatever you can. And he does this for about 10 years based in Tai-Joh.  Not well known at all, but I think he's doing pretty well.  But, you he's not making the newspapers or the Wall Street Journal or anything like that. And then around 1994,

14:59

He makes his first move that sort of sets him on the path to global prominence, which is he basically acquires a motorcycle business,  a state-owned enterprise in Taichung. It's called the Taichung Motorcycle Factory. And he starts making scooters under the Geely name. And okay, that's a business. Again, not world-class, but he starts to do a pattern, which we will see later is...

15:28

he acquires businesses,  transforms them, and in the process of acquiring, when he gets distribution, he gets some degree of capabilities, in this case, factory and maybe some distribution.  He will often use this or he often uses this to get a license he needed. In that case, you needed a license to make motorcycles, right? Okay,  over time, he starts to transform this motorcycle business.

15:54

into a passenger car business. And at that time, he starts his first car business 1998-ish. There were no private companies making cars. You couldn't get the license. Nobody was doing it. It was all state-owned enterprises like SAIC who had joint ventures with companies like General Motors and Volkswagen. And that's how car companies started to evolve in China was

16:20

They were these sort of joint ventures between prominent Western companies or Japanese and state-owned entities like SAIC.  Okay, so he's coming in as a wholly owned, no partner, private, not SOE, passenger vehicle company, 1997. And these are much simpler cars. These are economy cars, much lower price, much simpler. And they were kind of at that low level for the next 20 years.

16:50

Now when people talk about car companies out of China, they're mostly talking about the big state-owned enterprise, JVs, which are making medium-sized sedans and eventually SUVs. But low that there were low-priced passenger vehicles being done by companies like Geely was first.  Then you heard companies like Cherry,  Great Wall. Okay, so there's sort of two levels to China Auto for a long time.  And, you know, they started to do that, but he became very...

17:20

famous very quickly. And the lesson here is having the right product at the right time is always 51%. So he was making passenger cars in 1997. Yeah, he took off like a rocket ship. He's on the China Forbes list 2004.  Just several years later, know, G. goes public in Hong Kong 2005.

17:46

So, you know, he found his way into the right product at the right time. He caught the wave and he just rocketed upward.  Now, there's a lot of fun China stories around this period.  2001,  you know, I don't think he had a license to make passenger cars in 2001. I'm not quite sure how this came about, but there's a lot of regulatory gray in this period. And somewhere in this period, he partnered with and or bought

18:15

what's called the Sichuan De Yang prison vehicle factory,  some sort of state-owned truck manufacturer. Somehow by buying this, which was basically a struggling SOE state-owned entity,  he got infrastructure, but he also, I guess they had a license to do passenger vehicles.  I've heard reports of how this happened. I don't really buy them. To me, it's a lot of fuzzy things. Somewhere along the way,

18:44

He went from being in the gray regulatory zone to having a passenger vehicle license in China. Not really sure how he did it. Anyways, he rockets upward. By 2012, he becomes the second largest Chinese car exporter. So selling outside of China, behind Cherry, and he's shipping a hundred thousand vehicles overseas.  2017,  Jili becomes the number one domestic brand.

19:14

and really the number two car maker within China, second only to Volkswagen. Now also within those years, people know that at a certain point 2010, he acquired Volvo, which was a big deal. kind of made him, and we used to talk about this. I used to teach this in business school in China because when Zhili, which was a relatively small company at that time, bought Volvo, you know, that was like the mouse eating the lion.

19:41

they acquired something much larger than themselves. It was a very daring acquisition and it was one of the first acquisitions of a Chinese company buying a major Western brand.  you know, even today business schools still teach this case.  Anyway, so lots of acquisitions, lots of firsts, but yeah. Okay, he's skyrocketed upward. He's a prominent person, super successful, and then he does it again. So,

20:11

2019 or so, 2020,  he starts going aggressively into EVs. So again, this is the same, the right idea, the right product at the right moment.  Bam. He takes off in EVs.  2025,  G. sells 4.1 million cars overall, not just EVs. They've just been growing and growing and growing.

20:39

Okay, he's big, but keep in mind Toyota is about double of that. You know, they have about 10 million units they sell annually.  So he's big, but he's still smaller than the Giants.  EVs enter the market, he pivots, and he starts going into EVs. 2025, he's, G. is probably the number three EV maker in the world. They're definitely right behind Tesla. There are ways behind BYD.

21:09

and they are growing fast.  Here's some numbers.  2025 BYD sells a total of 4.6 million new energy vehicles. And they're growing at about 8 % up from 2024.  2025 Tesla, the same year,  sells about 1.6 million EVs globally. So quite a bit below BYD, but keep in mind, Tesla is a pure EV maker.

21:37

BYD is doing hybrid and other types. it's not apples to apples there. But their growth of Tesla 2025, 1.6 million vehicles sold, was about negative 8%. So they've been shrinking a bit. But those are pure EVs. In the same year 2025,  Geely Auto, Zeekr, they have a bunch of brands at this point. But under Geely Auto,  1.6 million units of electric and plug-in hybrids.

22:07

They're growing really, know, they're right there up with Tesla, although again, this is apples to oranges,  but their growth rate in this sector is 90 % year over year. So they're going up like a rocket ship. That's why I basically think GLE in the next year, everyone's going to realize this is the other BYD in the EV space. And if you've seen their cars, fantastic. They're really spectacular.

22:34

And they've put some new targets on the board. They say by 2030,  across all types of cars, they want to sell 5 million. OK, that would make them about half of Toyota. But they want new energy vehicles to be 75 % of their sales. So they're shifting into that pretty aggressively. And they want overseas sales to be 1 third. So I think they're just following the BYD playbook, which is really smart.

23:02

And when people make pronouncements like that, it's kind of like, OK, maybe they'll pull it off. Maybe they won't pull it off. That's why I told you the backstory of Eric Lee. When this guy says he's going to do it, I'm like, OK, there's a solid chance he's going to. This is a seasoned veteran entrepreneur at the top of his game. And yeah, I think there's a solid chance they will emerge as the number three EV maker in the world in the next year.

23:31

We'll see. I'm not really an auto guy, so keep that in mind, but I'm studying the software like crazy. Anyways, we went out to the headquarters.  I've posted an article on this. Lots of photos. Their cars are really cool. They've got multi- mean, they're a holding company now. There's Geely Holdings, and then there's Geely Auto, which is a sub holding, but they've got multiple brands in here. They've got Zeekr. They've got Geely itself as a brand. They've got

23:58

G. Lee Auto, is a brand. They've got Lincoln Co. They've got Volvo. They've got Polestar. They've got Lotus. I mean, they've got kind of a lot. They've got some motorcycles too, some electric motorcycles, which I am super tempted to ride because I love riding motorcycles. But man, electric motorcycles kind of scare me. They're just way too fast. know, that's how 19 year old guys get killed is, you know, motorcycles and maybe electric motorcycles. Anyways, I'm going to.

24:27

talk more about them in the next couple of weeks. I'm going back to visit their factory and I think I'm going to interview a couple of their executives, but I'm mostly looking into the software side. I'm not an auto guy. I'm looking in, you know, for all these robots I've been talking about, I'm mostly focused on the AI, the world models, the VLA models. Well, it turns out autonomous vehicles are basically just robots.

24:56

that focus on moving around on wheels.  But when you look at the world models, the world action models, the VLA models that handle their autonomous driving,  they're pretty similar to what's being put into robots. So I'm going to dig into the software. And it's really three things. You got to have the world model as the foundation. And a world model basically looks at the world outside,  projects a plan into the future. So it's a lot of imagination.

25:26

and then decides if that's the path to take.  VLA models, vision language action models, that's more tactical.  The analogy I've been using is a world model will look at a billiards table, where the balls are, and then decide the various ways you could hit the ball, and it will put those two things together, put in a lot of physics,  and imagine lots of future scenarios based on if you hit the ball this way, if you hit the ball that way, and it will predict

25:56

the future world state and tell you which way to hit the ball. Well, that's pretty much what an autonomous vehicle does. It looks at the road around you. looks at where all the cars are. It chooses an action state and it makes a prediction and then chooses. A VLA model is more like you throw a ball to a robot that has a hand and the VLA model moves the hand very specifically based on the ball in the air and catches it.

26:25

but it doesn't look at the whole environment around you. It's looking at the hand, it's looking at the ball, and it's very quickly sort of iterating to catch the ball and hold it. Okay, robots need both of those things. It needs to be able to pick up the book and the laundry, but it also needs to move across the room.  Autonomous vehicles are much more about the world action model, driving down the street. Now, in some cases, like hitting the brakes quickly, okay, that's a VLA-ish model.

26:52

but a lot of it's world actions. I'm going to dig into the models. So you have sort of the world model and probably VLA model. And then on top of that, you have two agents running based on those foundation models.  One model would be the autonomous driving agent. And the other agent will be the user interface. You're sitting in the car. You're talking with the car. You're asking it the mapping. You're telling it to change your TV. OK, so you sort of have two agents.

27:20

the autonomous driving agent and the user interface agent sitting on top of the foundation models. I'll dig into this a lot more over the next couple of weeks.  And I'm visiting a couple more of these leading EV companies in China in the next month. I'll talk a lot about some names I haven't actually talked about yet.  Big names.  It's pretty awesome, actually.  And it was that was kind of visit number one. And really important company,  super interesting. If you want to know more,

27:49

go on to jefftowson.com. I'm keeping most of the content there.  There'll be quite a bit about Geely, Zeekr, and a couple other EV companies, AV companies really, in the next couple weeks. Okay, that's company number one.  Anyways, from there we went sort of northwest over to Deep Robotics, their headquarters, in what's called the Zilin Plaza.  It's basically just kind of north of Alibaba and

28:17

really close to Zhejiang University. And the two founders of this company are both professors from there.  So that's pretty common for these robot companies.  Like Agibot, which I really like Agibot,  they have basically a founder who's a senior,  highly senior executive from Huawei. So deep, deep commercial expertise. That's a bit of an outlier. Most of these robot companies

28:44

They're usually professors and they're tied to a university in the robotics lab and it kind of spun out of there. And that's this case for deep robotics. I like deep. I've talked about them a lot.  For those of you who get my emails,  I sent you an email about deep last week. And it had more photos and videos than any email I have ever sent. I'll put the link in the show notes. You can click over and see it. But it is just...

29:11

I think this is the most information you'll find about Deep Anywhere. But all their robots, all the videos of the robots doing various things, the specs as much as they've released them, it's pretty awesome.  I would encourage you to click over in the show notes and take a look at that. It's pretty great. I'm not going to go through the history here again, as I've talked about this company before. But yeah, you go over to basically Zilin Plaza, you get these...

29:38

these videos and then you actually go see the company and you realize how small it is. This is a nice business park.  I put pictures of the business park in the article and in the show notes.  But you go there and it's just a bunch of buildings on a sort of a side street with some trees and it backs up to a river. And the river has a bit of grass and

30:03

You there in a couple floors of one building about five hundred employees there they got fabrication stuff other places.  But you come in and you know you park and you walk out and you see the robots just sipping around the parking lot cuz that's where they're training them. So, you know between the two buildings there's one building where they're based in another building which wasn't there you walk in the foot pathway between the two buildings. And they've got their staff out there smoking cigarettes and just run in the robot dogs up and.

30:32

down the pathway, basically training them. And you go behind the building, and there's sort of a grassy slope which goes from the building down to the river. Yeah, they got the robots zipping around on the grass.  I asked them, can you go in the river? They said, no, no, we can't go in the river.  But Deep Robotics does industrial grade quadrupeds, robot dogs.  And industrial grade means these things are hardcore.  Like, they can go in the snow.

31:02

They can go to minus 20 degrees Celsius and they can go up to 50 degrees Celsius, which means they can go up into the snow of the far north. And if you look at the videos I posted, you'll see them playing in the snow. They can also go into burning buildings because they can handle 50 degrees Celsius. And you'll see videos of them being used by firemen to go into buildings to look for people or to carry the fire hoses.

31:32

And it's crazy. They can also go underwater for 30 minutes submerged under one meter of water. And there's ratings for this. This is IP67, if you want to look it up.  They are rated, their core flagship model is rated to IP67. So, I said, oh, you can go in the river. Like, yeah, we could. These things are not actually supposed to go underwater. They’re not submersibles.

32:01

they can go under for that long and still function. So they can go across rivers and zip along the bottom and come out the back.  So anyways, they do have a river next door, but apparently they don't send the robots into the river. But they're going up the grassy knoll. They're doing somersaults. They're standing on their legs and flipping around. You know, it's pretty amazing.  The details that are worth one, go look at the article on my web page and look at the videos. They'll blow your mind how good these things are.

32:30

And I think industrial grade robots, I really buy this use case. The one you want to look at is called the X30. That is their flagship.  And they're basically right now giving it an upgrade. So they've sort of improved the specs.  It can go longer on the batteries. It can carry more weight.  You can see videos of it going into the extreme cold. They call it snowfield testing.  You can see it going into factories.  It's...

33:00

kind of amazing. Their main use case is still robot power inspections. They can give it sort of little peg legs, which means it can go up and down stairs real easy. It can walk through doorways and all that. That's pretty impressive.  They have another version where they put rollers on it, basically wheels on it. That's good for sort of widespread inspections, going into the mountains, looking at power lines.

33:27

It can zip up and down mountains and across rivers like it's nothing. I encourage you to look all that. That's called the Lynx M20. So look at the X30, the upgrade. It's worth looking at. All types of sensors you can put on it. Visual sensors,  radiation sensors,  all types. It's really pretty cool.  But the other thing they've rolled out, which is worth looking at, is they've released their first humanoid, which is the DR02.

33:57

We played with this thing in the parking lot basically.  You can, you know, they bring it out in the parking lot and you know, you can push it around and it doesn't fall down. It can do push-ups.  It can do fighting stances and things like this. Okay, but how is this interesting? Well, humanoids are interesting in general. What I like about this one is it's industrial grade as well. You'll see humanoids from lots of companies.  Unitree,

34:27

Usually they're smaller. They're like 150 centimeters tall. No, this one's 172 centimeters. That's basically my height. I think actually this one's 180.  So a little taller than me. This looks like an industrial grade robot. It does not look like a humanoid that does dancing on the stage, although it can do that. It is sturdy.  I mean, it can carry weight. It is, I mean, I like the whole space of industrial grade robots.

34:56

And it's got basically two battery packs in the back which you can pop out and pop back in. Some of these robots can change their own battery packs where one they can walk over and plug in and charge. Or if you want a faster thing, they walk over, they take a new battery pack and they stick it in their back and they take out the other one. This one can't do that yet, but some of them can.  My joke is, look, you should put the battery pack in the bump.

35:24

because it would be really funny to see the robots pull over and sort of take one out and pack one back in. I think that'd be really funny. They said, no, we're not doing that.  Anyways, go take a look at the DR-02.  I've put the specs, and I've kind of asked them,  like, what's the use case for this? And this one is, and they kind of said, look, it's mostly inspections at this point. Okay.

35:49

I see that could make sense. There are certain places where robot dogs can't go, but they're clearly going to expand into new use cases. You know, their core business thus far has been industrial grade quadrupeds focused on power stations,  factories,  firefighting, rescue missions. They can go places that others can't go, either for inspections or other use cases. I get it. Okay, why would a humanoid be different? I think they're going to roll out.

36:17

new types of use cases. So that's kind of interesting.  Now they have the specs here. This one is rated IP 66. IP 66, 67 means it can be submerged.  IP 66 means it's dustproof and waterproof. It can be in the rain. It can't go underwater to the same. So 66 to 67 is a big dividing line in ratings.  It's got the same temperature range.

36:47

out, you it can go into the fire to some degree. It can go into the snow. So they're definitely doing that. And then the strength of this thing is pretty impressive. And all of these things have, you know, basically AI assistant capabilities. You can go up and talk to it and tell it what to do. It can discover things on its own. I mean, these are programmable, but they're also self-teaching.  anyway.

37:16

Really cool, go look at the DR-02.  I think they're going to kind of expand their robot fleet and their use cases. I think there's an announcement coming, but I don't know. They didn't say anything. Anyways, that's company visit number two. I'm not going to go into it much more because I've written a ton about this already. I like deep robotics. I think they're very interesting. think Agibot is really interesting.

37:39

If you're looking at robots as cars, then I think Geely and Zeekr are super interesting. I'll talk about some more, but I do have a short list I'm paying the most attention to.  And this one is definitely on the list. Okay, that's pretty much it for companies. Let me give you a couple tools that I think are worth looking at.  Actually, first thing, I did visit one other company, which was the Fly Zoo Hotel. This is Alibaba's sort of new retail digitized hotel, which I wrote about like,

38:07

six years ago when they launched this or it's probably later than that now. You know, we're going to digitize a hotel and it's going to do things that other hotels can't do. This was back when we were putting digital into everything. And in some cases, it was a very powerful addition like supermarkets, know, fresh hippo. In other cases like convenience stores, the digitization didn't make a huge difference. Now, maybe robots are changing that now. You know, fly zoos close to that. Like when you digitize a hotel,

38:36

It makes it better. I don't think it transforms it. I don't think it's a massive upgrade, but I had never really stayed at this thing before. I'd written about it for years,  but I never really stayed at it. So I stayed at the Fly Zoo Hotel, which is kind of this futuristic hotel where you can make the reservation on your phone, which is Fliggy, which is the Alibaba hotel reservation app. You can check in on your phone if you want.

39:02

Once you're checked in, you don't need a key card. You can walk up to the elevator. knows who you are. takes you to the floor. You can walk up to the room. It opens the door. Now, I think they've gone back to key cards, but originally that was the idea. Okay, it was cool. It was space age. I didn't think... A lot of the stuff they were doing is pretty standard in hotels now. Like, I like to get my coffee delivered by a robot in the morning. So I order it online, usually Meituan.

39:30

And then the robot literally just comes to my door. It's almost always lucky in coffee now.  And it rings my doorbell. I open the door.  The robot's there with my coffee. I grab my coffee. That's pretty standard in a lot of most Chinese hotels now. You can get that everywhere.  So that's cool. I do like that. The room is all space age. You can change the lights of the room. It changes all sorts of colors. That was kind of fun. The toilet changes color.  The water in the toilet goes blue and green.

40:00

There's a lot of neon in tech and yeah, kind of fun. If you're curious about this, go to the article I posted on this, which is,  I'll put a link in the show notes. You can see the videos of the hotel room changing lights. I put a video of the robot coming to my door with my coffee. I even put a picture of the toilet seat, which was blue and purple. If you're curious, go check it out. Okay. But tools I think are useful here are two,  QwenWork and

40:30

Now, Quinn work is the Claude co-work and the, you know, chat GPT work of Alibaba, right? There's a couple of these tools which are let's apply agents to enterprise use cases, right? Like the two big, in my opinion, the two most powerful uses of agents right now are coding and enterprise.  So...

40:57

know, workers and businesses redesigning their workflows, which is agentic org, and then coding. Okay, within enterprise use cases, agentic org, which is kind of my big focus. Out of the West, we get Claude,  which is Anthropic. We get ChatGPT Work, same thing.  Microsoft has Copilot, which is not bad, but most people are using those first two.  Google has Gemini, which kind of sucks.

41:27

Out of the West is really two or three. Well, out of China, you get Tencent WorkBuddy, which I use every single day now. And then Alibaba, you get QwenWork. Q-W-E-N Work. They've changed the name a couple of times. It's QwenWork. Okay, QwenWork is now going international with a beta public version. You can get it right now. It's really powerful. It's available. Try it out.

41:55

I think WorkBuddy from Tencent and QwenWork from Alibaba, for me, I think these are going to be major players internationally for multiple reasons I won't go into. these are two companies that have all the frontier AI capabilities of OpenAI,  Gemini, Facebook,  Anthropic. They are right there with them in terms of their frontier level capabilities, and they are glowing global.  And here's the good news.

42:24

They are not necessarily looking to make profits from any of these things. They're not going public like Anthropic is trying to do and OpenAI is trying to do. They don't need to monetize. Now they are going to cover their costs because agents cost money so you need incremental revenue.  So they are offering these things way cheaper than what's coming out of Silicon Valley. In the same way Microsoft would be because they make their money elsewhere. And Facebook could because they make their money. They're not a standalone

42:54

agentic AI company. They can make their money in their other businesses.  So Alibaba makes money in e-commerce. They're combining that with AI and agents. That's Alibaba, Quinn work for enterprise. Ten cents, same thing. That's work buddies.  you're, know, a month ago, the story was you can either pay these high fees to Anthropic and OpenAI or you can use Chinese open source like DeepSeek. Those were your two choices.

43:22

Well, now you have a third choice. You can use an easy to use subscription model out of Alibaba or Tencent. I haven't checked the prices recently. It's way cheaper,  like 75, 80%. One, because they're not trying to make profits. And two,  they are, well, actually they are making profits. I shouldn't say that. But they are focused on international expansion. So right now is a really good time to get a good price. Anyways, go look at Alibaba QwenWork.

43:52

Fantastic. The version in China is way more powerful, but the international will catch up soon. They're kind of number two or number three in the market within China. The number one is arguably WorkBuddy from Tencent, and they're going international just like Alibaba. Try both of those, but Alibaba, QwenWork. Okay. Now there's one other tool that's worth thinking about, which is Accio. A-C-C-I-O. One of the companies, if you're doing e-commerce,

44:20

And especially if you're doing e-commerce and you're cross-border. Let's say you're in Asia or Colombia or Brazil, and maybe you're selling domestically, but you're also trying to sell into the United States, which is a very good idea, by the way. Okay, doing cross-border e-commerce is a bit tricky. You need to have different language. You need to understand a market that's different than yours.  You need to tap into a supply chain. Now, maybe you're in Colombia and you want to sell into the United States. Fine.

44:49

Or maybe you're in Colombia and you want to sell within Colombia, but you want to tap into the manufacturing base of China.  Okay, both of those are cross border in a certain way.  Okay, Alibaba.com, that's what they've been building this business of B2B e-commerce for 26 years.  Accio is the AI and now the agentic version of Alibaba.com. So if you're...

45:17

an e-commerce company in the US selling in the US but you're sourcing from China. You could source directly which is not too hard but it takes time. You could use Alibaba.com which is built in this business or you can use Accio which runs on top of Alibaba.com and has all their data. So it knows everything about supply chain cross-border. It's a really cool tool.

45:43

And you can increasingly not just do your supply chain, you can do the front end where you can say, look, I'm a Columbia business. selling in Columbia. I'm using Accio and Alibaba.com. Accio is an upgraded version of Alibaba.com with AI and Agenda embedded.  But I also want to start selling into Brazil and I want to start selling in Australia and I want to start selling in the US. Well, that's very hard for a small business to do unless

46:13

you use Accio because it can do the market analysis for you. It can analyze your strategy. It can suggest products because it knows all the markets. It can give you a good strategy for what you could sell and how. So it's the front end, not just the supply chain. Now they actually have two apps. One is called IDG, AIDGE and Accio. But I think they're combining them all into Accio and now they're rechristening in Accio work.

46:43

And it was, go look at Accio. You can just go to alibaba.com and you'll see it. It's their new AI agent upgrade. So if you want to do any sort of e-commerce and you want to supply out of China, that's a good idea. If you're doing e-commerce and you want to start doing cross-border into other markets, it's a really good tool.  And there's sort of the difference between this and Quinn work is it's simpler and it's really specialized on

47:12

cross-border e-commerce, whether on the supply chain side or the front end. So it's a specialized, simpler version. QwenWork is sort of super powerful for everything. This is a lot easier, I think. Anyways, go look at that.  I think it's great. I'm starting to play with it, and I'm starting to maybe try and sell things cross-border just for fun. Anyways, there's two companies and two tools, really just fun takeaways from our e-commerce training program, which I'm really excited about rolling this out to other...

47:40

geographies this year. I think that's going to be great. I hope that's helpful. Hope it's a little bit fun.  That's it for the content for today.  You can hear my phone's been pinging in this last couple of minutes. Our food has arrived and we've got a plan for Korean food and we're going to watch Asia. I'm sorry, no, Physical Mexico 100. Here's a recommendation.  There was this show a year or so ago called Physical Asia 100.

48:09

where lots of different athletes of every different type, they all compete. It did quite well. They did Physical Asia 100 Season 2, which had like Manny Pacquiao in it. In the last week, this is Netflix, they've released Physical Mexico 100 and Physical Italia 100.  one is, know, the same, basically the same thing in Italy with a bunch of Italian athletes. And we're watching the one in Mexico, which is really fun because they get like

48:39

hardcore Mexico athletes like football players and boxers and you know CrossFit champions,  but then for fun they also put in like cement workers construction workers and the construction workers are crazy strong. They're doing really well and they even got one guy who was a taco maker at Takeru. You know someone who makes tacos on the street, but who trains after work and

49:06

It's surprising to see how well some of the other people are doing. The construction workers are crazy strong. It's really interesting. And if that's it, there's a recommendation.  Watch, if you haven't watched Physical Asia 100, cool, or Physical Italia, Italy 100, or Physical Mexico. I'm kind of enjoying Physical Mexico. I think this to me and Asia are sort of the top two, but we'll see.  Anyways, that's it for me today. I hope you're doing well, and I'll talk to you in a couple days.  Bye bye.