Hu Jian, Founder & CEO of Iplayable: The New Blue Ocean for AI Application Going Global - Opportunities, Challenges, and Growth Paths | 2025 China-ASEAN Expo Brand Culture Going Global Exchange Conference

In the past two decades, the globalization stories of Chinese enterprises have mostly begun with products. Whether it's the small commodities from Yiwu or the electronic manufacturing in Shenzhen, the core of the narrative often lies in price, supply chain, and speed. Now, this landscape is quietly changing: What China is exporting is no longer just "replaceable products," but a whole set of experiences and identifications with cultural connotations. It is both abstract, manifested in intangible things such as culture, emotions, and story perception; and concrete, being touched, purchased, and remembered through the competitive craze of games, the daily narratives of short dramas, the taste symbols of new consumer products, and the global layout of capital.

On September 18th, 36Kr hosted a themed exchange event titled "Breaking Boundaries and Crossing Seas: Chinese Brand Cultures Entering the Global Market," focusing on the overseas expansion of culture. It brought together representative forces from multiple fields such as games, new consumer products, short dramas, and capital to discuss the new paths, challenges, and opportunities for Chinese culture in the global market.

Hu Jian, Founder & CEO of Iplayable Trial Interaction

Hu Jian, Founder & CEO of Iplayable Trial Interaction, delivered a speech. The following is the transcript of the speech, edited by 36Kr:

Hello, everyone. I'm Tony from Trial Interaction. I'm very glad to share with you today the opportunities and challenges of AI application going global. I'll talk from the application level, combining some market trends and specific cases to discuss the opportunities for Chinese teams in the global market.

Let's first look at the To B market. As we all know, the enterprise-level market has a large space, but in fact, it's not easy to operate. Large domestic platforms, such as ByteDance and Tencent, basically do everything by themselves and are unlikely to open up to external teams. As for the remaining small and medium-sized enterprises, many of them are struggling to survive and simply don't have the budget for large-scale paid investment. The really wealthy customers are state-owned enterprises, central enterprises, and banks, but such customers require a high degree of customization, local deployment, and also need to consider security and compliance, with very complex requirements. That's why in the past decade, we haven't seen truly large-scale SaaS companies in China, while in Europe and the United States, SaaS enterprises have developed very vigorously, with a large number of companies with a market value of over tens of billions of dollars emerging.

It's also not easy for Chinese teams to go overseas for To B business. To get large customers, they must penetrate local enterprises, understand their business processes, and it's very difficult to achieve this through online promotion. Large enterprises are truly willing to pay only when the sales team conducts long-term business development, visits customers, makes demonstrations, and builds trust. This poses a great challenge to Chinese teams. First, it's very difficult to recruit suitable local sales talents. Second, the cost is extremely high, and the sales cycle is particularly long. Many of my friends who started To B businesses went to Europe and the United States to lead teams to meet customers and participate in exhibitions. It took them one or two years to understand the market, with very high costs and difficulties.

So, if we look at today's AI going global, what really suits Chinese teams is still at the application level, especially To C tool products. Chinese teams have natural advantages in this area. We have long proven our ability to develop tool applications globally. Previously at Cheetah Mobile, we acquired over one billion download users with a single tool called Clean Master, reaching a peak daily active user (DAU) of 100 million, and even successfully listed on the NASDAQ. Today, the threshold for developing applications is lower than it was ten years ago. Many AI application teams may consist of only two or three people, or even one person working part-time, and they can still launch a product from scratch and earn tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. There are already many such cases.

From the perspective of market data, this opportunity is very real. The paid revenue of global AI applications was only $30 million in 2021 and has reached nearly $1.3 billion last year, a growth of dozens of times. In 2024, the global download volume of AI applications exceeded one billion times. That is to say, user demand is exploding rapidly. North America and Europe contribute nearly 70% of the global revenue, with very strong payment capabilities. Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India have higher download volumes and good user acceptance, although their payment capabilities are relatively weaker. However, if combined with advertising models or hybrid monetization, it's actually possible to make money.

In terms of product form, there are currently two main types of AI applications: APP and Web. APP has a mature distribution and payment system, and the promotion loop is relatively clear. However, the development cost of the Web version is lower, which is very suitable for market testing. After the model is proven successful, it can be considered for upgrading to an APP. Zero One Universe, a company we've served, is a typical example. They initially entered the market with a simple productivity tool and quickly grew through advertising. For entrepreneurs, the Web version is a very low-threshold direction to try.

Meanwhile, the capabilities of generative AI are still rapidly improving. Basically, a new version is launched every week, with increasingly powerful functions. The duration of video generation is longer, and the quality is higher. The VEO and Banana models of Google have already achieved quite amazing results. In the future, with the accumulation of computing power and data, the capabilities of AI will definitely become stronger and stronger. We shouldn't expect it to change everything in the short term, but its long-term potential must be very huge.

There's a Turkish company called Codeway. They seized this opportunity early on and redeveloped all their original traditional non-AI tools, adding AI elements and then relaunching them. In fact, in many cases, it was just a shell, but because it carried the concept of AI, it had very good results in promotion and customer acquisition, with more platform recommendations. The user volume quickly reached tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. This case illustrates a point: The opportunity for AI applications doesn't necessarily have to start from scratch. Even by combining AI to transform existing products, great success can be achieved.

When it comes to growth, we still have to talk about advertising. For AI applications going global, advertising is a very crucial part. Taking Google as an example, its search advertising is still the core channel in the European and American markets. We have several experiences in advertising: First, when choosing the market, we should give priority to Europe and the United States, and English landing pages have the best effect. Second, we need to find the core users and top players, as they can contribute 70% to 80% of the return on investment (ROI) and are the most valuable group. Third, keyword advertising should cover both brand keywords, industry keywords, and the keywords of competitors. Finally, copyright must be taken seriously, especially in the European and American markets. Don't use the images of celebrities or politicians in advertising materials, otherwise, it may directly lead to account suspension or even legal prosecution.

We once helped a domestic large video model company go global. Initially, we only invested a few hundred dollars a day for testing, and later gradually increased the daily investment to over $100,000, with a monthly revenue of over $10 million. Now, their focus is on promoting the large AI video model and global user growth, with double-digit month-on-month growth every quarter. The process we helped them with can be roughly divided into three stages: In the startup stage, we mainly used search advertising to obtain feedback from core users and iterate quickly. In the growth stage, we added display advertising and YouTube advertising to expand the user group. In the stable stage, we mainly focused on optimizing the ROI, and basically achieved a return on investment within 30 days. Such a model can form a sustainable positive cycle.

The application scenarios of AI are also constantly expanding. Recently, some entrepreneurs have developed an AI version of OnlyFans, with a monthly revenue of millions of dollars and a monthly growth rate of 50% to 100%. The low cost and high efficiency of AI may disrupt many industries. We're also involved in this area. For example, we developed a translation tool to quickly translate Chinese short dramas into small languages such as English and Portuguese, with very good results. The underlying logic is actually very simple, which is to aggregate leading large models overseas, but we optimized the workflow to make it more convenient for customers to use.

Within the company, we're also promoting the in-depth application of AI. For example, we require team members to use AI assistance when writing code, regardless of how simple the code is. We've also established a reward and punishment mechanism to force everyone to truly use AI. Many enterprises encounter resistance when promoting the implementation of AI because people have inertial thinking and it's difficult to change. However, if it's an AI-native team, this process will be much smoother.

Finally, I'll briefly introduce our company. We were founded at the end of 2017 and are a company focusing on overseas digital marketing and cloud computing services. So far, we've served over 5,000 companies going global. In the early days, our clients were mainly from the gaming industry, and later we expanded to social media and short dramas. Last year, we served many short drama companies going global in batches, and half of the top 50 companies were our clients. Our core team members come from Cheetah Mobile and Alibaba, and we're also the only company in China that has obtained authorization certifications from both international top media and cloud computing providers. We can help clients with front-end growth and advertising, and also provide cloud computing and AI services at the back end, offering a one-stop solution for enterprises going global.

That's all for today's sharing. Thank you!