The list of Alibaba Partners has changed again

There have been new changes in the list of Alibaba Partners. Recently, Alibaba's annual report for the fiscal year 2026 revealed that Wu Zeming, the CTO of Alibaba, has officially joined the 5 - member Partnership Committee. Xu Hong, the CFO of Alibaba, and Zhou Jingren, the core builder of the Tongyi large - model Qwen series, are among the new partners of Alibaba. Shao Xiaofeng, a veteran of Alibaba and the chairman of the Risk Management Committee, has exited the partnership but still retains positions such as the executive vice - president of the group.

Put simply, it's a case of a veteran retiring and two new members filling the gaps. However, adding or subtracting a name from the list of Alibaba Partners has never been just about personnel adjustment; it's about the future direction of this trillion - dollar company.

01

Three out of the Five - member Committee are from a technical background

Shao Xiaofeng, with the nickname "Guo Jing", was born in March 1966 and joined Alibaba in 2005. He is the executive vice - president of the group and the chairman of the Risk Management Committee. "It's a normal retirement as there is an age limit for partners," Wang Feng, an Alibaba staff member, told Caixin. Zhou Jingren joined Alibaba in 2016 and previously came from the Microsoft Research Institute. He is the core builder of the Tongyi large - model Qwen series. "Jingren joined the partnership last year, but it's just formally and compliantly disclosed in this year's annual report," Wang Feng said.

Previously, there were rumors on the internet that "Zhou Jingren had submitted his resignation". Alibaba officially responded to the media on June 14, saying that "it's purely a rumor". However, in the organizational restructuring on June 8, Zhou Jingren was transferred to the position of chief scientist and exited the daily management of the Tongyi Division. With the change in his position, the nature of his partner seat has become the only question mark to be verified in the list.

In addition, Xu Hong, the CFO of the group, has newly joined the Alibaba Partners. He joined Alibaba in July 2018, served as the deputy chief financial officer from July 2019 to March 2022, and has been the chief financial officer since April 2022. "There is usually a CFO among the partners. It was Wu Wei before. After Wu Wei retired, after a transition period, the new CFO, Xu Hong, has done a great job, so he has entered the partner queue," the above - mentioned Alibaba staff member said.

Judging from Alibaba's actions in recent years, the CFO has changed from a "financial steward" to a "resource allocation war command center": hundreds of billions of dollars in share buybacks, disposal of non - core assets, and capital expenditures in the tens of billions for AI capex. Decisions on where this money should flow require the CFO to share the same rights and responsibilities as the CEO.

Another person on the list is Wu Zeming, with the nickname "Fan Yu". He was born in 1982 and joined Taobao in 2004. He was promoted from a front - line engineer to the CTO of the group. According to the information disclosed in the fiscal year 2026 report, Wu Zeming has officially joined the 5 - member Partnership Committee of Alibaba. As of June 2026, there are 18 Alibaba Partners, including Fan Luyuan, Jiang Fan, Jiang Fang, Jiang Jiangwei, and Liu Zhenfei. The Alibaba Partnership Committee consists of 5 people, namely Ma Yun, Cai Chongxin, Wu Yongming, Jiang Fan, and Wu Zeming.

Looking at the changes in the Alibaba Partners this time, on the surface, it seems to be a personnel adjustment of "a veteran retiring and two new members filling the gaps". However, from a strategic perspective, adding or subtracting a name from the list of Alibaba Partners always has deeper implications. Alibaba's partnership system is essentially a power structure formally written into the articles of association by the founder Ma Yun in 2010: partners have the exclusive right to nominate more than half of the seats on the board of directors, which means that whoever is on the list of partners has the right to vote on the company's future direction.

The 5 - member Partnership Committee is the real power center, which decides "who is eligible to be nominated as a partner". The "permanent partners", Ma Yun and Cai Chongxin, are not restricted by age and tenure and are the soul of the entire structure. Among the 5 - member committee, Wu Yongming, Jiang Fan, and Wu Zeming are all from a technical background. This is a reconstruction of the decision - making mechanism, sending a profound signal: from now on, the top management of Alibaba defaults that technology is the top priority in strategic issues.

Wu Zeming is the best example. In 2004, he was an engineer who joined Taobao during its early days. He was the chief technology officer for Double 11 and later served as the wartime CEO of Ele.me and Taobao Flash Shopping. After Alibaba established the Group Technology Committee, he, as the CTO of the group, is responsible for the business technology platform and the AI inference platform. He has gone from "keeping the system stable" to "driving business growth" and then to "making the AI foundation run". His resume precisely proves that he entered the 5 - member circle not because of his youth but because the battles he has fought are exactly the samples that Alibaba needs at present.

02

All - in on AI + Offensive in Instant Retail

Alibaba's emphasis on the importance of technology and AI is not without reason. Putting all the clues together, a fact emerges: Masayoshi Son of SoftBank has gradually reduced his stake in Alibaba from 30% over more than 20 years to about 3.38% by mid - 2026, and SoftBank has become an "ordinary institutional shareholder". Before SoftBank became an ordinary institutional shareholder, Alibaba's partnership system was a "shield" to prevent external capital from interfering.

Li Chengdong, an e - commerce investor and the founder of Dolphin Intelligence, told Caixin that Shao Xiaofeng represents the era of Alibaba's traditional "strong internal control and strong risk restraint". In the early days of Alibaba's expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and offline investment, the top - level management would exercise checks and balances, limiting radical investment, preventing excessive spending, restraining price wars, and strictly controlling compliance costs. Now, Shao Xiaofeng's exit means, to some extent, that this restraint mechanism is weakening.

In this context, a question arises: when there is no external obstruction, what can ensure the success of the "offensive AI narrative" internally? This has to start with why Alibaba places AI and technology at the top. Li Chengdong believes that in the past, the top - level decision - making power at Alibaba came from the person in charge of the e - commerce business, merchant operations, and offline retail management. Technology was just a cost center and a business support department. When the growth of traditional shelf - style e - commerce has reached its peak and major e - commerce platforms are continuously diverting traffic, relying solely on commodity transactions and merchant service fees cannot support long - term valuation and competition.

"Next, AI will no longer be a supporting tool for e - commerce but the underlying operating system that defines all retail businesses. Therefore, the importance of AI in the entire Alibaba Group has increased significantly. The operation - driven model is shifting to a technology - driven model," he continued. The capital market has imposed real constraints: the valuation ceiling for pure e - commerce is extremely low, and only by adding a general AI narrative can the price - earnings ratio be restored. E - commerce is the largest scenario for AI implementation, and AI is Alibaba's greatest differentiating weapon in its e - commerce business against competitors.

Therefore, the answer to "what can ensure the offensive AI narrative" for Alibaba is: all - in on AI + offensive in instant retail. Cai Chongxin and Wu Yongming wrote in their letter to shareholders on May 20: Consumer behavior has undergone profound changes, and the expectation of 30 - minute fast delivery has become the norm... Instant retail has become the core strategic pillar for the upgrade of the Taobao and Tmall platforms. In other words, if Taobao wants to dominate the "30 - minute delivery" consumer interface, it cannot degrade from an app that users open every day to a "warehouse that users only think of when they need something".

To this end, Alibaba's management has repeatedly emphasized that through AI path optimization and intelligent dynamic scheduling, the on - time delivery rate of orders has been stabilized at 96%, and the structure has shifted from being dominated by catering to all categories, with the non - catering proportion exceeding 75%, targeting 3C digital products, beauty products, clothing, medicine, wine, and fresh produce. On the merchant side, the capabilities of AI agents are being integrated into the business operation process and gradually becoming tool - based; on the user side, the Qianwen App is deeply integrated with Taobao Flash Shopping, enabling users to "place an order with a single sentence and have it delivered", which is Alibaba's first large - scale implementation of the entire process from "AI dialogue to real - world transactions".

Although Alibaba has cards that its competitors don't have, such as the ability to directly dispatch the goods from Tmall brand flagship stores for instant retail supply, allowing brand merchants to serve two different time - sensitive markets with one inventory without having to make a choice, whether this transition can be smoothly achieved remains to be verified by time. Li Chengdong believes that the core observation indicator for Alibaba is the cross - GMV proportion between the Token Foundry Division (AI full - stack) and Taobao's instant retail business. Ultimately, it still depends on the actual AI effects and specific data.

In other words, how many flash shopping orders are truly "facilitated" by Qianwen's recommendations or the scheduling of AI agents, rather than being placed by users after their own searches? Alibaba has to use actual actions to break down this figure. The change in the Alibaba Partners has first replaced the engine for this cruel war.

(The name Wang Feng in the article is a pseudonym)

This article is from the WeChat official account "Caixin WEEKLY", author: Yi Xi, editor: Wu Yue. It is reprinted with permission from 36Kr.