How Alibaba’s Digital Vision Is Shaping AI‑Powered Smart Cities and New Retail

Future cities will digitize every element—from fire hydrants to traffic lights—enabling perception, intelligent processing, and connectivity, as envisioned by Alibaba CTO and DAMO Academy director Zhang Jianfeng, who believes China can redefine standards through digitalization.

Speaking at the 2018 China Computer Conference, Zhang emphasized that digitalization is the foundation of intelligence, allowing not only improvements to existing businesses but also the creation of new models and opportunities across city governance and new manufacturing.

Alibaba has accumulated massive application data and built world‑class infrastructure to better extract value from this data, focusing on frontier technologies such as AI chips and graph computing.

Data’s impact is evident in new retail and cross‑border e‑commerce, where, for example, Hema stores are testing 3D reconstruction of physical malls to offer novel shopping experiences, and Alibaba’s AI enables machine translation in 48 language directions for millions of SMEs.

Both the City Brain and Industrial Brain initiatives are digitizing urban and industrial processes, fostering innovative management models that bring traditional manufacturing into the era of new manufacturing.

Alibaba also announced strengthened academic collaboration, with the DAMO Academy’s Intelligent Computing Lab partnering with Tsinghua University to establish a professional committee on cognitive computing, advancing next‑generation cognitive graph technologies.

The company is developing a next‑generation ultra‑large‑scale cognitive graph inference engine, applying it to e‑commerce, travel, entertainment, and payment scenarios to deliver deep personalization; this engine is already the world’s largest e‑commerce cognitive graph.