How this Ex-Alibaba Cloud VP plans to bring AI to traditional fields

After a career with some of the world’s leading tech companies, including eight years at IBM in New York and Singapore, a stint with Google in Silicon Valley, and two years with Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, China, Min Wanli decided to go back to his roots.

Min Wanli, founder and CEO of North Summit Capital and former Alibaba Cloud vice president / Photo credit: North Summit Capital

In June, he resigned as vice president of Alibaba Cloud to start an investment firm specializing in AI solutions for China’s traditional industries, including agriculture.

Min, 41, was born into a farmer’s family in Jinzhai County in eastern China’s Anhui province and spent his childhood growing up in an area known as “the cradle of the generals,” where 59 of the country’s famous wartime generals were born.

Min’s mother was illiterate and his father dropped out of school after junior high school, a consequence of the decade-long Cultural Revolution instigated by chairman Mao Zedong, when millions of Chinese were deprived of the right to education and society unraveled amid the political and social upheaval from 1966 to 1976.

Born in 1978, Min avoided the chaos and soon showed great talent and interest in mathematics. In fact, he was considered very bright as a boy and only studied three years in primary school before entering secondary school.

“Going to school was like going to a nursery. My family needed to do farm work and I was too young, so I was sent to school,” said Min as he sipped on Chinese tea brewed in a traditional-style clay teapot.

At 14, Min was accepted into the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), which has fostered many of the country’s tech leaders, including Zhang Yaqin, former president of Chinese search giant Baidu, Ma Dongmin, co-founder of Baidu, and Guo Yuanlin, former president of Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup.

While at USTC, Min studied mathematics and physics, skills that laid the foundation for his future research work and shaped the way he approached problems. No longer in research, he still uses mathematics and formulas to analyze projects as founder and chief executive of North Summit Capital.

His 13th-floor office in the Shenzhen Trade Centre in Nanshan district, at the nexus of China’s proposed Greater Bay Area business and tech hub, includes a whiteboard covered with mathematical formulas for various projects. A map of the world hangs on the wall behind his desk, and on a clear day Min can see Hong Kong through the French windows.

There has been a lot of talk lately about traditional industries integrating their businesses with new technologies, but Min explains that this involves more than just opening a public WeChat account or building an ecommerce platform.

“When we look at the many problems they face […] it’s a mathematics problem,” said Min, who is also a member of China’s National Advisory Committee on the Next Generation of AI.

In fact, he believes most problems can be abstractly explained using mathematics, including production flows in manufacturing and agriculture, traffic flows in city management, and even diagnosis decisions in health care.