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Sharon Gai
Accelerate AI adoption with Sharon Gai, keynote speaker and former Alibaba executive. Sharon works with organizations navigating digital transformation to build AI-enabled strategies, drive revenue growth, and future-proof their workforce, with clients including UBS, Deloitte, Walmart, and LVMH.
Sharon Gai is an AI strategist and keynote speaker who helps organizations become agile disruptors in their industries, increasing revenue and retaining users in an era of rapid technological change.
As a former executive at Alibaba, Sharon advised brands and heads of state on digital strategy, programmatic marketing, and artificial intelligence. This experience now informs a body of speaking work built on what she has seen work at scale across some of the world's most sophisticated commercial ecosystems.
Sharon's client roster spans sectors and continents. She has worked with TEDx, Singularity University, UBS, Deloitte, Walmart, LVMH, Nestlé, Tetra Pak, and Twilio, among many others. Her commentary has appeared in Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, CBC, TechCrunch, Wired, and The Next Web, and she is a recognized voice in retail and technology circles as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert and LinkedIn Community Top Voice in 2024.
Sharon is the author of two books: How to Do More with Less, published by Wiley in 2026, and Ecommerce Reimagined: What We Can Learn from the Best of Retail in China. Her keynotes draw on a central idea she calls the shift from busy bee to beekeeper. Sharon's vision is that leaders must stop optimizing for speed and instead learn to design systems, direct digital labor, and focus human talent on judgment, taste, strategy, and trust. It is a framework built not around any single model or tool, but around a way of thinking that remains useful as the technology continues to evolve.
Book Sharon Gai when you need a keynote speaker who can make AI strategy feel urgent, accessible, and genuinely actionable, for CEOs, leadership teams, industry conferences, and organizations ready to move from conversation to transformation.
Topics, sessions and talks
For decades, organizations structured themselves around human labor — reporting lines, departments, and leadership models all optimized for people doing tasks faster. Sharon Gai argues that this logic no longer holds. She introduces a durable mental model for moving from task-based org charts to capability-based, AI-enabled structures. This CEO-level session enables leaders to identify which roles to automate, augment, or elevate; redesign reporting lines when AI handles execution; and focus human talent on judgment, strategy, and trust.
Every new AI headline lands the same way: a quiet question of whether people still matter. Sharon Gai answers that question with a clear yes. Drawing on what she witnessed at Alibaba and across hundreds of organizations, she identifies the four human capabilities no model can replicate and shows how to deliberately strengthen each one. Audiences leave knowing which of their skills to lean into, how to move from bee work to beekeeper work, and why the irreplaceable skills are learnable, not just innate.
The rules of retail are being rewritten at speed. Sharon Gai draws on case studies from Alibaba and Pattern, Amazon's largest third-party seller, to show how AI and automation are reshaping every layer of the retail value chain, from personalization and customer experience through to supply chain and logistics. Retail leaders leave with actionable frameworks for cutting costs, streamlining omnichannel operations, and identifying the disruptive technologies most likely to define the next phase of commerce.
Sharon brings a unique blend of Eastern and Western expertise in AI, eCommerce, and digital transformation, offering invaluable insights that can propel your team or business forward. With her proven track record at Alibaba and recognition as a top keynote speaker, she can provide actionable strategies to leverage technology for your success. Booking Sharon means gaining access to a wealth of knowledge that can transform your approach to digital challenges and opportunities.
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frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
Sharon Gai structures her keynotes around a central framework she calls the shift from busy bee to beekeeper — a durable mental model that reframes how leaders think about human versus AI labour. Rather than cataloguing tools or trends, she builds each session around this throughline, using case studies from Alibaba and Pattern to ground the framework in observable commercial outcomes.
Sharon Gai speaks on AI-enabled organisational design, human irreplaceability in the age of AI, and retail value chain transformation. She is a former Alibaba executive and author of two books on AI and ecommerce, published by Wiley.
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