China’s rigid corporate culture slows AI adoption, ex-OpenAI executive says

Consumer boom, enterprise lag

Former OpenAI go-to-market head Zack Kass says China’s consumer appetite for AI is racing ahead, while its enterprises move cautiously. Kass, who led go-to-market at OpenAI from 2021 to 2023 and now runs his own consultancy, told the South China Morning Post that China is a “techno-centric consumer” market, whereas the United States is a “techno-centric enterprise” market. The implication is stark: Chinese people will try and embrace new AI tools quickly, but their companies often lack the organisational flexibility to deploy them at scale.

What’s holding firms back — and why it matters

Kass pointed to traditional hierarchies, long procurement cycles and risk-averse management as the main brakes on corporate AI adoption in China. It has been reported that nearly 1,000 people queued at Tencent (腾讯) headquarters in Shenzhen for free installations of the OpenClaw agent, and local social platforms were reportedly offering paid installation services charging up to several hundred yuan — a sign of consumer enthusiasm that hasn’t translated into enterprise projects. Why does this gap matter? Enterprise AI drives productivity, procurement of cloud services and demand for higher-end chips — the areas where China faces both internal organisational challenges and external geopolitical pressure.

Geopolitics complicates the picture. U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and related tooling have constrained some hardware options for Chinese cloud and AI providers, and trade frictions make partnerships with Western enterprise software vendors more fraught. Those constraints increase the premium on internal organisational change: if firms can’t simply buy their way to cutting-edge stacks, they must reorganise to adopt the software and workflows they can access. Can China's corporate culture adapt quickly enough to turn a voracious consumer market into enterprise competitiveness? The answer will shape how China competes in the next phase of AI.