Joe Tsai, Chairman of Alibaba Group, recently attended Wave by Vento2026, an international technology and investment event in Italy, and stated that over the next five years, AI will evolve from an explicit topic into invisible infrastructure embedded in all businesses.
Tsai analyzed that current AI technology is better at helping humans 'save time,' while breakthroughs in 'time-spending' still hold enormous potential. Among these, improving knowledge workers' productivity is the most certain application scenario, with an estimated total addressable market (TAM) of $50 trillion, and AI will also accelerate innovation in healthcare and scientific research.
Regarding the industry chain and business layout, Tsai divided Alibaba's development into two stages with 2023 as the dividing line — the former 'BC' and the latter 'AD' — clearly defining e-commerce and full-stack AI as core directions, and advancing the full-stack AI strategy comprehensively across computing power, models and the application layer.
Speaking about China's AI competitive momentum, he noted that China possesses about 30% of global industrial production output, and that high-value manufacturing data accumulated by factories together with complete hardware supply chains in fields such as electric vehicles and robotics will translate into significant advantages in the stage of deep integration between AI and the physical world. At the same time, Tsai reaffirmed the key value of the open-source philosophy, believing that the open-source path is bringing development opportunities to European 'Neo Cloud' companies, and that European industry can combine local computing infrastructure with open-source models to optimize operations.
At this moment when technological innovation intertwines with uncertainty, the AI industry stands on the eve of full-stack and ubiquitous deployment. Tsai's exposition of the full-stack AI strategy and the open-source ecosystem not only clarifies Alibaba's own development path in the new era of intelligence, but also provides an important reference for global industries relying on the integration of software and hardware and pragmatic cross-border cooperation.