A Competition That Planted AI Deep Into the Business
On finals day, Letright’s AI pioneers gathered at Alibaba Global Headquarters — the frontier of AI innovation in China — for the grand finale of a two-month journey. From kick-off to finals, Letright joined hands with QwenWork to carry the spark of AI into every corner of the business: e-commerce, audit, finance, manufacturing, R&D, and HR alike. Twenty teams made it to the grand finals, and a wave of AI applications rooted in real business scenarios — from intelligent image generation and fully automated order follow-up, to automation-powered efficiency gains in audit supervision and quality inspection — is now accelerating its move from “impressive demos” to “daily workhorses”, turning frontline experience into organizational capability that anyone can reuse.
The Finals Judging Panel
The finals jury was led by Li Ren, Chairman of Letright, and Zhaozhong, Vice President of QwenWork, joined by Hang Yuan, Head of Solutions for the Central China Region at QwenWork; Ba Lei, President of the QwenWork AI Consulting Research Institute; senior consultant Wang Jiayu; senior lecturer Mu Lan; and a host of Letright senior executives. Together they put the Top 20 through their paces through a professional lens of three questions: “Does it run and deliver results? Does it show the hard numbers? Can it keep evolving?”. The scoring meant business too: project substance carried the main weight, with live presentation as a supplement — the question was never whether the slides looked good, but whether the business problem was actually solved.
Insights from the Keynotes
In his opening address, QwenWork Vice President Zhaozhong laid out three steps in the evolution of AI: from L1, point efficiency gains, to L2, enterprise-grade context governance, and on to L3, AI replacing human effort in critical business operations. There is no shortcut to deepening AI — context capability is an enterprise’s true moat.
“AI is a zero-one game — a competitiveness that decides whether an enterprise lives or dies.”
Wang Jiayu, Letright’s chief AI transformation advisor, reviewed the journey in a talk titled “From One Person, to a Group, to an Entire Organization”: AI transformation needs both top-down and bottom-up momentum — the Chairman sets the direction at the top, while grassroots heroes step up to carry the load. The whole point of the competition, he said, is to turn one person’s clever usage into a group’s new habit, and then let that group’s experience settle into an asset of the organization — taking the know-how scattered across individual minds, storing it in an enterprise knowledge base, and making it organizational capability available to all. In his view, AI is not just a set of tools; AI is a new way of working.
The Chairman’s Closing Remarks
In the closing session, Chairman Li Ren delivered the final word. After years in the outdoor furniture business, he knows exactly how hard this industry is — fashion-driven, seasonal, and non-standard all at once, long dependent on experience and a handful of capable people keeping watch. This competition, however, showed him a new possibility: the people who understand the business now have a way to build that experience out.
He has led by example himself — from strategy documents to daily routines, AI has become his “trusted right hand”. He has asked every department head to treat AI as a “Number-One Priority project”: leaders use it first, knowledge bases are made solid, and scenario maps are drawn deep, so that more and more scenarios get solved by AI.
“Twenty years ago, Letright was the first company in this industry to fully embrace PC-based office work; twenty years on, I hope we can also be at the very front when it comes to AI-powered work.”
To the whole company, he put it plainly:
“Those who can use AI will replace those who cannot or will not; companies that can use AI will replace companies that cannot.”
And behind this sweeping change, he left every Letright employee one anchor that never moves: stay customer-centric and reward the dedicated. Using AI well is, in the end, about serving customers even better.
After the Curtain Falls, the Real Show Begins
The competition has ended, but the story of AI taking root in the business has only just begun. Identify talent through the contest, grow talent through the contest, drive adoption through the contest — the Top 20 projects grew out of the shop floor, the spreadsheets, and the order books, and it is back to the shop floor, the spreadsheets, and the order books that they will return. Chairman Li said he looks forward to the next review, when these projects are “in the hands of more people, in sustained use and still improving”. The QwenWork service team will continue to run alongside Letright — letting every “super individual” ignite more people, and letting AI keep delivering measurable efficiency and real value in genuine business scenarios.
AI leading the way, intelligence creating the future. See you on the next leg of the journey.