How a Small Wholesale Stall Transformed Into a 40M RMB Business with AI
In the back corridors of Guangzhou’s famous Thirteen Hongs wholesale market, where fabric bolts are stacked floor-to-ceiling and bargaining never stops, a quiet revolution is underway. And unlike the polished keynote demos from big tech companies, this revolution runs on spreadsheets, OCR scans, and a WeChat chatbot that won’t shut up about overdue payments. Zhang Feng—the “Feng” behind one of the most talked-about AI transformation stories in China’s wholesale circuit—has a way of making the extraordinary sound mundane. “We just connected everything,” he told me over a video call, his laptop open behind him showing what looked like a dozen browser tabs. “ERP to this, WeChat to that. Suddenly everything talks to everything.” ...