Unique Research · Insight / Unique Go-Global interview · November 15, 2023 · Guest: Gong Yi (龚毅), Founder & CEO, Kua.ai (Kuai.ai) · Author/editor: Qiuping
AI and go-global define this year’s hottest themes. Capturing AI’s dividend to open overseas markets is widely seen as Chinese firms’ largest near-term opportunity. Kua.ai (also styled Kuai.ai) builds a generative-AI content marketing and management platform for cross-border e-commerce.
Founded 2022, Kua.ai offers AI Agents and workflow automation for global e-commerce marketing. It already serves tens of thousands of cross-border merchants — including brands such as ZIROOM/致欧 and TYMO — and is an Amazon Web Services AI partner in cross-border e-commerce, certified into the AWS Partner Network (APN). The team began exploring GPT-2 text and multimodal A/V for marketing as early as 2021.
Intelligent custom AI content that drives sales
Kua.ai covers marketing stages with a configurable AI platform, rich prompt apps, proprietary e-commerce and social data, and seamless LLM integration — helping merchants and go-global brands build AI-based SOPs that produce “content that sells,” cutting cost and raising efficiency.
The site offers 300+ prompt apps and workflows for Amazon listing writing, SEO/blog, and social ops. Coverage across three stages:
1. Pre-research — recommend hot / potential hit products for target markets, analyze local consumer needs and pain points, optimize product innovation and assortment; search and analyze high-quality keywords for exposure.
2. Listing — generate product descriptions from product traits and audiences, with templates and asset libraries; auto-generate overseas social promo content and video scripts.
3. After-sales — personalized email from customer profiles and interaction history; account-appeal letters aligned with platform rules to improve account safety and stability.
Gong: Kua.ai’s goal is not chasing every new AI headline but using advanced AI for revolutionary efficiency gains for cross-border merchants — with clear boundaries. Scenes stay concrete: Amazon and DTC sellers lifting sales. Example: optimizing listings for conversion — merchants using Kua.ai report 20%–40% conversion lifts. Scenario focus is the first differentiator vs. generic genAI tools.
Second pillar: workflow. High-frequency ops tasks are automated step-by-step via AI, specialists, or both, with tools connected — using chain-of-thought techniques to raise automation success — plus Amazon data and third-party ecosystem connectors. “Help users optimize business processes on AI workflows toward digitized cross-border marketing,” Gong says.
China vs. overseas customers
China clients are often cross-border / trade bosses who already see AI’s value and want management uplift but are constrained by talent and digitization — they want tools plus enterprise service: personalized workflow config, training, and SOP templates so staff can adopt AI. Kua.ai’s enterprise edition bundles training, product, and service templates.
Overseas audiences are more solopreneurs and SMBs who self-learn via YouTube, Discord, Facebook groups, and influencers. Kua.ai supplies more interaction and resources to hit their pain points and learning drive. Same value proposition, different operating paths.
On avoiding generic, brand-less AI copy: creators still need their own thinking, topic direction, voice, and structure; facts, cases, and unique angles; then detail edits — like assembling a Rubik’s cube. Kua.ai’s product stack must match that content workflow, call knowledge bases, and let creators’ ideas settle in — continuous polish as the real value choice.
Three premises for AI transformation
Gong: don’t start by philosophizing “what AI is” — ask what each tech wave changed. Miaoya Camera is essentially digitized portrait service for early adopters; “internet retail” is still retail with higher efficiency. Many companies’ first job is not AI tech per se but helping digitized-ready customers plug AI into new workflows. If knowledge lives only on paper that is costly to digitize, AI reuse is hard — that is premise one.
Two: distill best practices into standards (e.g. marketing content process and topic criteria) before AI can amplify them.
Three: change collaboration — roles/teams that digitize assets, document workflows, and put them on an AI platform. Kua.ai’s products and solutions lower the barrier; firms with awareness and base capability will pull ahead fast.
Chinese SaaS going global: challenges
With overseas tech parity, Chinese engineers’ drive and efficiency are a solid base — but excellent global SaaS still faces two hard problems: communicating product value, and bonding with target users.
Western SaaS sells benefits with clear stories, not feature lists. Second, find channels and interaction styles users actually prefer — not only WhatsApp/Facebook; some prefer SMS, some video/audio. Third, embrace overseas SaaS ecosystems: collect feedback continuously, iterate, and build management systems for users and product — not only founder hustle.
Roadmap & challenges
1. Pure tech KPIs — deepen prompting and workflow R&D, track mainstream AI, raise success rate and reasoning; next year push further so Kua.ai becomes cross-border merchants’ “smart brain” with more platform ecosystems.
2. Segment global users and tailor experiences instead of one generic product.
3. Strengthen the value claim: automation is not the end and must not sacrifice product value — embed first-party brand/merchant knowledge into the AI platform; invest in helping merchants build knowledge bases / brand assets simply.
Top challenge: closed-loop customer feedback each cycle so the team builds industry know-how — and keep finding precise scenes where current tech actually kills pain.
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