Zhao Jiehui, Founder and CEO of DeepExi, emphasized that success in China's B2B market depends on deep engagement with flagship clients, leveraging their feedback to iterate products, and building intelligent systems that enhance or replace key business functions.
Zhao elaborated on intelligent system with Jany Hejuan Zhao, the founder and CEO of NextFin.AI, during the 2025 T-EDGE. The annual feast of ideas brings top scientists, entrepreneurs and investors to address the pressing issues of the AI era, which kicked off globally on December 8 and runs through December 21.
Drawing parallels to Palantir's success, Zhao said the key lies in "building flagship clients to establish industry influence, providing deep services to top-tier customers, and using client feedback to iterate products and services."
He described this model as "trading depth for barriers and leveraging benchmark clients to build an ecosystem," which aligns closely with the underlying logic of China's B2B market.
According to Zhao, sustainable revenue and gross margin growth in the ToB market depends on becoming the go-to advisor for clients. Companies must stay a step ahead of their clients in technological iteration, service quality, and industry insight. This capability, Zhao noted, cannot be outsourced—it requires in-house talent with both R&D expertise and business acumen, a rare and highly sought-after skill set that must be cultivated internally.
Zhao stressed that true intelligent systems are not standalone models or tools, but complete ecosystems capable of replacing or augmenting specific roles. Such systems must excel in three core areas: processing scenario-specific data, training models based on that data, and seamlessly integrating models into existing workflows.
He emphasized that the first principle of ToB business is creating customer value through technological advancement. Even when service investments are high and margins are under pressure, companies should not deviate from this principle. Instead, Zhao said, firms should leverage visualized operations, product iteration, and upgraded service capabilities to transform labor-intensive tasks into high-margin offerings.
"The key is continuously abstracting generalizable capabilities and productizing pain points discovered during service delivery," Zhao added.
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