Alibaba president Joe Tsai spoke at CNBC’s Converge Live event in Singapore on Wednesday.
CNBC
Artificial intelligence could eliminate the need for future research analysts, Alibaba chair Joe Tsai said at CNBC’s live converge event in Singapore on Wednesday.
“Equity research analysts can be completely replaced… You can ask them to put together reports on Nvidia or Apple. It will do a great job,” he told CNBC’s David Faber.
But that doesn’t mean that the role of analysts will be completely eliminated, he said at a two-day live event at CNBC’s Jewel Changi Airport.
“I don’t think it’s going to replace humans entirely. It’s just actually improving the quality of the work,” he said.
“I think if we can do a lot of ordinary research-related things by machine, we can really improve the quality of our research. And humans can apply their judgments and make better recommendations.”
AI is also supposed to fundamentally change legal practice, he said.
“When writing a contract… the whole document needs to fit well. Every statement, every definition must fit together. “Does that mean that lawyers will be replaced by AI in the future? Not necessarily.”
He said that when clients hire “sophisticated lawyers,” they really want advice.
“A lawyer is not technical, nor is it black or white, that’s a judgement,” he said. “I think these jobs will be simply enhanced by AI, not exchanged.”
AI has an addressable market of at least $10 trillion, but “if not large,” Tsai said on CNBC’s Converge Live, saying it’s bigger than industries like transportation and health insurance.
Alibaba benefits
Alibaba is now benefiting from the spread of this AI thanks to its cloud computing business, the chairman said.
“Every time someone trains and models or runs inferences, or runs post-training, they need a cloud computing infrastructure,” he added.
Experts previously told CNBC that Alibaba is making “great progress” to advance its AI cloud business. In the December quarter, the company announced a sharp increase in profits on the strength of its cloud intelligence units and e-commerce segment.
Tsai also said that Alibaba can also benefit a lot from AI within its business, for example by enhancing advertising on its platform.
In a recent column in the South China Morning Post, Tsai highlighted that practical applications to maximize intelligence in AI model development are key.
The president of Alibaba Zhang Kuo recently told the same paper that he hopes that the Alibaba.com platform will adopt AI tools by 2025. Over half of the 200,000 merchants already use such tools for marketing, product management, customer interaction and risk control.
Last week, the e-commerce giant unveiled a new AI model. It “rivals” other inference models, such as the R1 of Chinese AI startup Deepseek.
Manus AI, created by Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, announced its strategic partnership with Alibaba on Tuesday. Developed by Chinese startup Monica, Manis AI, is a so-called popular AI agent and claims better performance than Openai’s AI agent Deepresearch.
