On the evening of October 7 Beijing time, Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA) Chairman Joe Tsai attended the international technology and investment event Wave by Vento 2026 in Turin, Italy, where he discussed the application value of AI, Alibaba's full-stack AI strategy, and the outlook for AI's future development.
Tsai predicted that AI will shift from being an explicit topic of discussion to implicit infrastructure. "In five years, people may no longer discuss AI separately, because it will be like today's internet, embedded in every part of business. The terminology may evolve with the level of technological adoption, but AI, as a fundamental technological breakthrough, will continue to shape business and society."
During the discussion, Tsai focused on sharing Alibaba's AI development strategy, using 2023 as a dividing line to split the company's development into two phases.
Tsai referred to Alibaba's founding period from 1999 to 2023 as the company's "BC era." During this phase, Alibaba's business scale continued to expand. Starting in 2023, the company entered the "AD era," explicitly focusing on two core businesses—e-commerce and full-stack AI—and treating AI as a key direction for the future, deciding to commit fully.
In his view, AI has opened a new era of development, and it has only just begun.
Tsai further elaborated on Alibaba's full-stack AI from the perspectives of computing power, models, and applications: at the computing power layer, it builds computing capabilities based on Alibaba Cloud's 17 years of accumulation and its leading position in the Chinese market; at the model layer, it independently develops large models to form intelligent capabilities; at the application layer, it applies AI to products and services for both consumers and enterprise customers.
Regarding the current boundaries of AI's capabilities, Tsai believes that AI excels at helping people "save time," but has not yet achieved the same breakthrough in helping people "spend time," and there remains enormous development potential. In his view, improving the productivity of knowledge workers is the most certain application scenario for AI. He estimates the related total addressable market (TAM) at approximately $50 trillion. In fields such as healthcare and scientific research, AI can also serve as a tool to accelerate innovation.
Tsai also explained the open-source AI approach of Chinese companies, with Alibaba as a representative. "Just as a top university would open to the world and provide scholarships for students, AI should also open-source its progress so more people can benefit. This also stems from a philosophical choice by Chinese companies."
Tsai is very bullish on several "Neo Cloud" companies emerging in Europe. He believes the open-source path is Europe's opportunity. Europe has a large number of industrial enterprises that can truly utilize this data and use open-source models to improve business operations. What Europe needs to do is build computing infrastructure so that open-source models can run on its own infrastructure.
When asked about the development of China's AI industry, Tsai said that China currently accounts for about 30% of global industrial production. Chinese factories have accumulated a large amount of high-value manufacturing process data that can be used to train AI models, helping companies improve product yield rates and optimize product design. In addition, China has a complete hardware supply chain in AI-related fields such as electric vehicles and robotics. In the future development stage where AI integrates with the physical world, this supply chain advantage will translate into significant competitiveness.