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18+ years Digital & IT leadership across consumer goods and health care industry, 9…
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked thisReflections after Alibaba Apsara Conference 2026 Last week I joined Alibaba Apsara Conference in Hangzhou. If I use one sentence to conclude this conference, this year AI comes to: the competitive focus moved from agentic potential to real production value. 1. AI Infrastructure, compressed into three words Alibaba framed this year's agenda as Model, Harness, Context. The industry now says out loudly that the model is only one third of the story, harness and context become two major areas for value creation. 2. Applications: three more concrete shifts - Enterprise context and skill modulization. Organizational relationships, business rules, role permissions and workflows structured into context; job experience turned into reusable skill modules. - The execution layer came to the front. One practitioner put it plainly: most enterprise AI projects are stuck at proof of concept, and the bottleneck isn't model capability — it's the lack of an execution layer that goes into the business and owns the outcome. - The real blocker is permissions and data boundaries. A state-owned enterprise executive wanted to solve one very specific problem — employees phoning in to ask about order status. Building the agent required connecting to their procurement system, but the group strictly limits external platform access for security. The idea stopped there. The last mile of enterprise AI is context, someone who owns the outcome, and the boundaries of data and permissions. 3. My learnings and conclusions I run digital transformation in a highly regulated industry, and three years in, my experience converges with this year's shift: The test for AI was never 'how powerful is the model' — it is 'can it be validated, and can you produce the evidence?' So the hard, valuable work isn't model selection. It's three questions: - Can your process be broken down to the step a model can actually take over? - Is the knowledge you feed it trustworthy, traceable and maintainable? - When something goes wrong, can you produce a complete trail log? Models you can buy. Context, an execution layer and permission boundaries you cannot — they only grow inside your own organization. And how to build a manageable and scalable harness becomes crucial for Enterprise #AI #DigitalTransformation #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LifeSciences
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked this"Why is IT so expensive?" is a question I've been asked more than once, in different words, across almost every year I've been a CIO. Boston Consulting Group (BCG)'s Rohit Nalgirkar, Dr. Michael Grebe, and colleagues published research this week arguing CIOs and CFOs need a shared way to value technology, based on its contribution to day-to-day operations, business expansion, and genuine innovation that provides very helpful reading. I'd frame the CIO's mission as three commitments that have to run together: drive visible operational excellence, continuously drive down cost, and build the business capability that creates real competitive advantage. In one of my former companies, we ran a program called Run to Grow. Part of it was renaming the organization, from IT to IDS, Information and Data Solutions, and being explicit with the business about why: the new name stood for a real shift in emphasis toward building capability, not just running infrastructure. Operational excellence came first. It was important to use reliability metrics that actually reflected what the business experienced, so we could avoid green scorecards and red faces. Costs came next. We showed how we could reduce IT costs as a percentage of revenue by 100 basis points over five years, and we held ourselves to that glidepath: simplifying architecture, consolidating suppliers, eliminating overlap, and right-sourcing to vendors who had much more scale and could do the same work often better and cheaper using that scale. That combination, strong operational results plus the rebrand, changed how the function was seen. It earned us a seat at the table with business leaders to figure out, function by function, the capabilities that mattered most to the long-term strategic plan, capabilities that had the potential to deliver hundreds of basis points of value in EBIT over time. Revenue Growth Management was one. eCommerce was another. Winning at operational excellence and cost is often what earns the credibility to lead on the third commitment, building capability, where the real upside tends to live. Without that credibility, stakeholders have far less reason to follow your lead on changing how their part of the business runs. Full research from BCG below. https://on.bcg.com/3UwXfLF #CIO #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #TechnologyStrategy #EnterpriseTechHow CIOs Can Prove the Value of Technology in the Age of AIHow CIOs Can Prove the Value of Technology in the Age of AI
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked thisPowerful Healthcare Executive roundtable on the AI Enterprise Transformation : AI Native E2E Process Transformation, Governance challenges, leadership engagement, and critical organization redesign and up-skilling! Thanks to Fractal and Matt Gennone for hosting. Nothing is more critical than our Healthcare ecosystem playing to win! AJW #WaitingIsNotAnAction Chris Montgomery, MBA David Feldman Lalit Arora Stephan Hirschler Kelly Woltornist Femmie Schippers Chad Malone, M.D. Craig Hazledine Deependra Singh Loïc Giraud Kamal Kasi Sagar Shah Deepti Nagpal Airton Miranda John "JT" Scott Sam Pierre-Louis, Ph.D. Sopheara Peoples Uday Bikkasani
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked thisGrowth starts with understanding Her. My recent visit to China reinforced that belief. I spent time with our P&G teams, our material suppliers and our equipment suppliers—and saw how staying close to consumers, combining capabilities, and moving with speed, brings strong and meaningful innovation to life. Consumer centricity is not the responsibility of one function. It must shape how all of us set priorities, make choices and build the capabilities we need for the future. Three things stood out to me: - Start with a deep understanding of Her needs. - Bring together the best expertise from within our cross-functional teams and across the external ecosystem. - Deliver today while building the capabilities that will enable the right product, package and process innovation tomorrow. To serve Her better. The collaboration I saw in China, inside P&G and with our external partners, was a strong reminder that only an integrated Brand and Technical master plan enables the right strategic interventions in our supply chain, with pace. In turn, the Brand and Technical master plan only enables the growth intended if it is inspired by real consumer needs. China once more showed us the power of all this coming together. My takeaway for supply chain professionals is simple: stay close to the consumers you serve; create integrated plans across commercial and technical; and connect near-term interventions with the future destination. Thank you again to the P&G China team and our partners—enabling growth in the region and far beyond.
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Jason Yao liked thisWow — NVIDIA acquiring Hugging Face is a big one. I use Hugging Face almost every day, so this feels particularly interesting to me. Hugging Face has become such an important part of the open-source AI ecosystem — not just for models, but also for the broader developer community and tooling around AI. NVIDIA has dominated the infrastructure side of AI. With Hugging Face, it looks like they’re moving further up the stack into models, developers, and the open-source ecosystem. It will be very interesting to see what comes next.Jason Yao liked thisI’m excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face. Over the past decade, the Hugging Face team has built something remarkable: a vibrant home for the open model developer community. More than 18 million 🤗 developers, researchers and creators use its platform to share models, datasets and applications, while companies around the world use it to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide. Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will continue to choose the models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers and computing platforms that best fit their work. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through the platform. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI. AI advances faster when people can build together. We can’t wait to build the future with this extraordinary community. https://lnkd.in/gE765Fwq
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked thisIncredibly fortunate to be celebrating AJW-Advisory LLC Ten Year anniversary today! It's been an powerful journey with great partners and executives. Making connections to release value for some of the greatest companies in the world, bringing executives together to learn & grow, and driving impact for non-profits making the world a little bit better has been priceless. Thanks to family, friends, and colleagues across industries for helping on the journey. Keep playing to win and when you need my help, I will not be "waiting." ;-) AJW #WaitingIsNotAnAction Fractal Vintage Investment Partners Asper.ai Cloverpop Skai Silk Lingaro Infinite Services JUNOdts Simile Verix Virtualitics Vorto True Essence Foods Latend Glean EnsembleIQ Ivy Mobility Blue Bridge People
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked thisIt was a great morning with our Costco Wholesale intern class of 2026. An abundance of knowledge, energy and promise that this generation will make an immense impact in all that they do. They will make the world a better place. Thank you for all your contributions to Costco.
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Jason Yao liked thisJason Yao liked thisI'm delighted to share that I've joined the Kosmoy Advisory Board. Most people hear "governance" and think brake pedal. I think rails. Rails are the reason a train runs at 200mph instead of 20 — the constraint is what makes the speed possible. Kosmoy does this across four layers: inventory (what AI exists and who owns it), monitoring (what it costs and how it's behaving), governance (one policy enforced everywhere it's called), and control (containing what agents can actually do). Today the market sells this as five separate things — gateway management, agent management, observability, security, compliance. That creates a highly fragmented app landscape, and with CIOs trying to shrink their app footprint rather than grow it, consolidating this into one platform could be much needed help. Kosmoy's bet is that this was always one problem, and failing to treat is such is partly why shadow AI, invisible agents, and blown token budgets keep happening. One tech executive asked me in some despair ' how are we going to keep tabs on 1000's of agents running around? '. Perhaps help is near. They proved this out in a central bank and inside one of Europe's largest defense companies first — not the easy places to start. That's what's fueling their momentum right now, and if it holds up there, CPG, retail, and most other industries won't be the hard part. Which is personal for me. Helping CPG and retail companies scale technology, and now AI, has been my career mission — and as I spoke about at the Consumer Goods Forum in Vienna in June, many companies don't get AI past the pilot stage. Kosmoy helps ensure that lack of governance, compliance or control isn't the reason why. Umberto Malesci, Bernd Würmseer Kosta Savic, Giacomo Calcaterra — thank you for the warm welcome. Andy Walter, Corrado Azzarita, Dan Herlihy, Anushil Kumar, Caroline Basyn, Emmet B. Keeffe III, Reza Nazeman, Carlos Buss, Amit Potnis, Manish Varma, Filippo Catalano, Susan Doniz, Dipanshu Joshi, Shashi Mandapaty, Dipak Golechha, Amit Banati, Mark Voytek, Nupur Dutta, Ashwin Bhave, Shishir S. Pathak — thought this would be relevant to you. #EnterpriseAI #DigitalTransformation #HelpCIOscaleAI
Experience
Education
Licenses & Certifications
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ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) V3 Foundation Certificate
Examination Institute for Information Science
Issued -
PMP
Project Management Institute
Issued ExpiresCredential ID 1518961
Languages
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English
Full professional proficiency
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Chinese
Native or bilingual proficiency
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