Coffee with the Council Podcast: Meet This Year’s Asia-Pacific Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Sharon Gai

This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsors, Feroot and Jscrambler.

Welcome to our podcast series, Coffee with the Council. I'm Alicia Malone, Director of Communications and Public Relations for the PCI Security Standards Council. Today, I am so excited to bring you a sneak peek interview with PCI SSC's Asia-Pacific Community Meeting keynote speaker, Sharon Gai.

Sharon Gai is a global expert in e-commerce, digital strategy, and cross-cultural innovation. After nearly a decade at Alibaba, guiding global brands through China's digital market, she authored E-Commerce Reimagined and now helps companies bridge east and west. Sharon, it's a pleasure to have you with us today.

Sharon Gai: Thank you so much, Alicia. I am so honored to be invited to this podcast and super excited to be jumping into this conversation with you today.

Alicia Malone: So, Sharon, I've just introduced you as an expert in retail innovation and artificial intelligence, but I'm curious, how do you define yourself? What title best suits you?

Sharon Gai: I usually go with author and keynote speaker, mainly because that's what I do day to day. In sort of one sentence, I help organizations and knowledge workers figure out tomorrow, or the future, in this AI-driven age. So, you could also call me a bodyguard of work, or for workers, if you wish. Where hopefully that with my content, I'm imbuing people with the right skill sets, the right mindsets, pointing them in the right direction of what to concentrate on, because there's going to be a lot of change that's coming down the pipeline. And it's important for more and more of us to know and understand what that change is going to be so that we can orient ourselves to be better positioned for the future.

Alicia Malone: I’m always curious about how people carve out unique global careers like yours. Did you always envision yourself working at the intersection of tech, e-commerce, and culture? What is your story and how did your journey begin?

Sharon Gai: So, my story began, I guess, with a LinkedIn InMail that I received one day. I don't remember the year by now because it was a very long time ago. So, I was originally born in China, grew up in Canada, came to the U.S. right after college, and then I eventually went back to China. But that journey, or that ping-pong, or that boomerang of back and forth, wasn't as smooth as it is after everything has happened and I'm telling you about the story. But all of the cross-section of the technology, e-commerce piece, and the cultural piece that really came together when I received that LinkedIn InMail.

It came from a VP at Alibaba at the time. He was employee #52. Funny enough, he wrote that in his InMail. And at the time, Alibaba was already hundreds of thousands of employees, so when someone says I was employee #52, you kind of pay attention. First, you know, like everyone, I was like, is this spam? Because we all get a lot of those as well. But then I went, I read more into his background, and whatnot, and it was an invitation to an event at Asia Society.

Asia Society is this think tank that we have in New York City where I live, where at the time I was already going to every other week or so because I was part of this Young Leaders program there. So, I was already familiar with the location, and I thought, why not go because I would have already been there already. So, I went and funnily enough at this event, I bumped into my high school roommate. So, someone from my past life decades ago, and I said, what are you doing here? And then she said, I didn't know that you were thinking of going back to China also to work. I said, I actually didn't have that thought at all! So, we both sat in the audience, went through the presentation, went through the event. And it was a recruiting event. At the time, Alibaba was a company that was globalizing. So, it had reached, it knew it would be reaching the peak of its user base in China, so it was expanding all around the world, and that was right around when I joined that company. So, I went back to China, and I joined this e-commerce behemoth, and the rest is sort of history with the position that I did at different assignments in, the countries that I moved to, to where I am now.

Alicia Malone: I love that story. You just never know where life is going to take you. What do you enjoy most about what you do, and what do you find are the biggest challenges that you encounter?

Sharon Gai: I think I am so blessed and fortunate to be in the position that I am. I feel like I have put myself in a self-programmed PhD program that I made up and I designed. I have these modules of learning that I have to go through. I have to write a quote unquote “dissertation”, which is my upcoming book. It feels like a PhD dissertation, but it's basically compiled everything that I have learned and know about things that's happening in the AI space and also my opinions and my insights. And, I then have to fly around the world and go to different events and stages and tell people about pieces of my dissertation.

So, I feel like I've put myself in a makeshift PhD program in a way and what better position can I be to be in a paid place to be a student, to be a lifelong student of learning. And so, I think that's what I thoroughly enjoy is that ability to learn, absorb things, but also to tell people about the important things that I have come across and that I have learned. My challenge, I would say, is I think navigating through the uncertainty.

I think many of us, especially with what's happening in the AI space, whether you are a student, whether you are a company leader, whether you are a knowledge worker, or working at any sort of company, it's very uncertain. I think the ability to navigate between what is noise and what is signal is a very important skill. And it's one that I have come to get to know myself and get better and better at. But I think that's still a challenge that I have in trying to navigate all the different pieces of data and information that's amongst us and to sift through all of that noise, and to pinpoint myself to a place in the future where the future becomes less and less uncertain.

Alicia Malone: In the world of e-commerce and digital strategy, identifying market risks and interpreting consumer data is critical, much like how other industries rely on data to make their high-stakes decisions. Can you walk us through how you use data and insights to guide strategy and reduce business risks in your work?

Sharon Gai: So, to backtrack a bit, to introduce you to sort of the world of e-commerce in China and Alibaba as a whole, it is a very data-driven company. So, because of the number of users, first of all, there's about a billion or so internet users in China. All of them have their own micro behaviors and the way that they interact with apps. But each of those little micro behaviors, so the amount of even microseconds you're staying on a product detail page or the number of swipes you're swiping on a page, as all product detail pages have about nine images, at which point of looking at one of those images did you actually add that product to cart or did it actually make you buy the product? All of those micro behaviors make up the fuller picture of what that customer likes and doesn't like and what makes them buy or not buy something.

And so, the power with a company like Alibaba and Chinese e-commerce at large is it's very good at knowing their customers very well. And so, previously in my roles, I would work with teams like TMIC. Which is a T-Mall Innovation Center, an internal team where we would match together, where we would match the data that we had internally with a brand and look at what new products should this brand be making so that it would sell more product. Because oftentimes in R & D departments, they're sort of looking at general market research or they're downloading information from a Gartner to look at where this larger industry is going or where things are trending. And then, they would go and make that product. So, for instance, in an example with Coca-Cola, for instance, what new flavor of lemonade could we come out with next?

And so, the more traditional route is to go through these different layers of either data providers or market research focus groups to gather all of that data for your R & D teams to assemble this and to create a product and then to put online to sell. In a newer way of product creation is you go directly to this e-commerce platform, or you'd go directly to the selling point, the platform where you'll actually sell this product and get them to tell you what are your people buying, what are your users clicking on and interested in and searching for, and then telling that data to your R &D team. So, it makes product creation a lot faster. And it also reduces a lot of business risk and risk of you maybe creating a product that your R & D team thought was going to be amazing but maybe didn't actually launch very well. And then, you would have this huge load of inventory, and you now have to dump or discount somehow. And so, those were some of the projects that I worked on in my previous life.

Alicia Malone: That is so fascinating! It's amazing how many elements go into predicting that consumer behavior. And another element that I want to focus on is AI. AI is transforming industries everywhere, especially in how we process and act on big data. In your experience, how is AI changing the way businesses predict that consumer behavior or market trends? Do you have any standout examples where AI has made a real impact on strategy or decision making?

Sharon Gai: So, right around 2023, 2024, do you know this brand called CeraVe? It's a skincare brand. It's pretty, you can find it in all sorts of drug stores. So, they did a pretty successful campaign during the Super Bowl where they used AI to identify rising TikTok creators before these creators would hit peak virality. So, a lot of marketing teams usually have a limited amount of budget to spend to hire for a certain type of influencer. Of course, you would want the sort of mega influencers to stand behind your brand because they have better reach. Although, their reach sometimes can be too general and too broad. But this was an experiment when CeraVe, instead of using these traditional A-lister type influencers, they focused more on micro-influencers that had a higher engagement with skincare type of content. So, are you a TikTok user? 

Alicia Malone: Yes, I am.

Sharon Gai: So am I. So, if you search within TikTok, “Derms in the Wild”, it's a campaign that CeraVe did and they were able to use social listening tools to spot these earlier trends and creators that would couple very well with the brand, but wasn't so mass in their following. And so, they were very successful in predicting who would become influential instead of hiring people who were already really influential. And that saved them a lot of money. And, following suit, whatever happens with one skincare brand usually then sort of echoes throughout the industry. And a lot of other CPG companies started to take a similar approach in using social listening tools to save more marketing budget.

Alicia Malone: Well Sharon, we are very excited to see you on stage this fall as our keynote speaker at our Asia-Pacific Community Meeting in Bangkok. Without giving away your keynote, can you give us a little sneak peek at what we might expect to hear from you? What do you want audiences to take away from your presentation?

Sharon Gai: So, the world of e-commerce and payments is definitely changing. So recently, Visa did their big announcement where they were going to work with tools like ChatGPT, like Perplexity, like Mistral, like Claude to embed the ability to buy something inside an LLM tool. So, their sort of vision is that people will be looking for products or searching and buying products within these LLM tools and eventually they will become our personal shopping assistants. And so, I think in the future, the payments space is going, a lot of Visa competitors and payment providers are probably going to follow suit where they're thinking of doing something similar.

And so, part of my keynote is going to be sharing with everyone and updating everyone in this type of new environment where our reliance on LLMs is just going to increase. And that we used to have a saying where software ate the world and now there's a saying where AI is eating the software which is eating the world. And I think we're going to enter an era where AI agents are going to perform a lot of tasks that once were performed by humans. And so, from a knowledge work perspective, what sort of things can we start to outsource to agents? Or first of all, I mean, just educating the audience, what AI agents are and what type of tasks can they take on? What sort of agent tools can we build internally versus find a vendor to outsource to.

So, that's a lot of the parts of the presentation and the takeaway is that the evolution of how AI is going to replace traditional apps and become the new interface and how payments will become more invisible, automatic and embedded. And also, a view on what the future consumer expects.  We're so spoiled as consumers where if something is delivered even a couple of days late, we're either canceling the order or looking towards a competitor, but our consumers are going to be more and more demanding with speed, with the way that we want our services to be personalized to us. And so, what can vendors and companies do in this new ecosystem, in this new environment?

Alicia Malone: Your keynote sounds so exciting, and I cannot wait to hear it! I know that the payments industry is one of those areas that is constantly changing and innovating. So, I can't wait to hear how your findings and your expertise really fit into knowing what the future holds for us in the payments industry.

And since you're on Coffee with the Council, we like to ask our guests how they take their coffee or if you're not a coffee drinker, what do you prefer instead?

Sharon Gai: I'm absolutely a coffee drinker. However, I also, I don't know where you live, but I live in New York and recently we just had a lot of Chinese bubble tea shops open up. And so, that's also with this wave of Chinese companies that's, you know, at first, they outsourced sort of physical goods and then they outsource all the apps like the TikTok, the Shein, the Temu. Now this next trend or this next wave of export is going to be these F&B, food and beverage, type of models. There’s this tea brand that is gaining popularity. It's called HeyTea, like H-E-Y-Tea. They'll probably be coming to a city near you in the U.S. because they have very ambitious plans in following suits in the footsteps of Starbucks and having a store around every major shopping mall and busy intersection. So, I'm drinking a lot of that these days: HeyTea.

Alicia Malone: I love it. Well, I'm based in the Pacific Northwest. I'm in Oregon. And so, we take our coffee and our Starbucks very seriously. But I also really, really love bubble tea. And you've sold me on this HeyTea. I can't wait to try this.

Sharon Gai: Yeah, I wonder, I know it's definitely in L.A. on the West Coast. I don't know about Oregon. I feel like the coffee stronghold might be very strong for HeyTea to break into. So, maybe Oregon might be one of the last places.

Alicia Malone: It might be.

Sharon Gai: Since coffee culture is so strong there, who knows?

Alicia Malone: That's so true. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Coffee with the Council, Sharon, and we look forward to seeing you at the Community Meeting this fall.

Sharon Gai: Thanks so much! I look forward to the event that's coming up very soon as well.

Alicia Malone: You can catch Sharon on stage as the keynote speaker at PCI SSC's Asia-Pacific Community Meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, November 5th and 6th. Registration is now open on our website, and we hope to see you there.

This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsors, Feroot and Jscrambler.

Like what you’ve heard? Subscribe to PCI SSC’s “Coffee with the Council” podcast by visiting any of the following platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Anchor, Castbox, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Audible, Overcast, or Pandora.