Alibaba Tsai Chongxin: In five years, AI will be integrated into every aspect of society like today's Internet阿里巴巴蔡崇信：五年后 AI 将如今天的互联网，融入社会的每个环节

On the evening of October 7, Beijing time, Alibaba Group Chairman Cai Chongxin attended the international science and technology and investment event Wave by Vento 2026 in Turin, Italy, and exchanged views on the application value of AI, Alibaba's full-stack AI layout, and the future development prospects of AI. Cai Chongxin predicted that in the future, AI will change from an explicit topic to an implicit infrastructure. “Five years from now, people may no longer be talking about AI alone, because it will be integrated into every part of the business, just like the internet is today. Relevant terms may evolve with the popularity of technology, but AI, as a fundamental technological breakthrough, will continue to affect business and society. In the exchange, Cai Chongxin focused on sharing Alibaba's AI development strategy. He divided the company's development into two stages with 2023 as the boundary. Cai Chongxin called the period from 1999 to 2023 of Alibaba's entrepreneurship the" BC period "(BC period) of the company's development; Alibaba at this stage continued to expand its business scale; since 2023, the company has entered the" post-AD period "(AD period), clearly focusing on the two core businesses of e-commerce and full-stack AI, and deciding to invest fully in AI as a key direction for the future. In his view, AI has opened a new era of development and has just begun. Cai further explained Alibaba's full-stack AI from the computing power, model and application level: at the computing power level, relying on Alibaba Cloud's 17 years of accumulation and its leading position in the Chinese market, it builds computing power; at the model level, it independently develops large models to form intelligent capabilities; and at the application level, it applies AI to products and services for consumers and enterprise customers. Regarding the current capability boundaries of AI, Cai Chongxin believes that AI is good at helping people "save time", but has not made the same breakthrough in helping people "spend time", and has great development potential. In his view, improving the productivity of knowledge workers is the most certain application scenario for AI. He estimates that the relevant total potential market size (Tam) is about $50 trillion. AI can also be a tool for accelerating innovation in areas such as healthcare and scientific research. Cai Chongxin also elaborated on the AI open source path of Chinese companies represented by Ali. “Just as a top university opens its doors to the world and offers bursaries to students, AI should open-source its progress to benefit more people. It also stems from the philosophical choices of Chinese companies.“ Cai Chongxin is very optimistic about several “Neo Cloud” companies that are emerging in Europe. He sees the open source path as an opportunity for Europe. There are a large number of industrial enterprises in Europe that can really take advantage of this data and use the open source model to improve business operations. What Europe needs to do is build a computing infrastructure that allows the open source model to run on its own infrastructure. When asked about the development of China's AI industry, Cai Chongxin 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 to help enterprises improve product yield and optimize product design. In addition, China has a complete hardware supply chain in AI fields such as electric vehicles and robots. In the future, this supply chain advantage will be transformed into significant competitiveness in the development stage of combining AI with the physical world. Original title: "Cai Chongxin: In five years, AI will be like today's Internet, integrated into every aspect of society"