What AI model should your company adopt in 2026, Deepseek or Claude – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok compares at her weblog Chozan two AI models your company can pick from in 2026. “DeepSeek vs Claude is not a comparison of two AI tools. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of deploying intelligence inside an organization,” she writes.

Ashley Dudarenok:

DeepSeek vs Claude is not a comparison of two AI tools. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of deploying intelligence inside an organization.

In 2026, the critical question is no longer which model performs better. It is how AI is integrated, scaled, and governed across real systems. DeepSeek and Claude represent opposite answers to that question.

McKinsey reports that 88% of companies now use AI in at least one business function, but only about one-third have actually scaled it across the organization. That gap—between using AI and scaling it—is exactly where the difference between DeepSeek and Anthropic shows up.

DeepSeek treats AI as a cost-efficient, flexible infrastructure layer that companies can shape and deploy internally. Claude treats AI as a controlled, enterprise-ready system designed for reliability and structured execution.

This distinction matters because companies are no longer experimenting with AI. They are deciding how deeply it should be embedded into operations, and that decision requires choosing an architecture, not just a model.

More at Chozan.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Deepseek vs Gemini – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok looks at her website ChoZan into the differences between the two leading AI companies, Deepseek and Gemini. In detail, she examines where both companies work best, as they differ profoundly.

Ashley Dudarenok:

At a surface level, both models aim to compete at the frontier of AI capability. The difference shows up in how they are built and where they are meant to win.

DeepSeek stems from a Chinese engineering mindset that prioritizes efficiency and scalability in deployment. Teams behind it have roots in quantitative finance and high-performance computing. That influence shows in how aggressively they optimize for cost and inference efficiency.

Gemini, developed by Google, prioritizes differently. It is designed as a deeply integrated intelligence layer across products like Google Search, Gmail, and Google Workspace. The goal is not just performance but ecosystem dominance.

This creates a practical divide. DeepSeek vs. Gemini is not a purely model-based comparison. It is a comparison between an efficiency-first challenger and an ecosystem-first incumbent. A similar divide appears in DeepSeek vs ChatGPT when deployment model and control are compared directly.

More at ChoZan.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How Trump played poker in Beijing, where the game was Pokemon – Victor Shih

 

Victor Shih

Political analyst Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy,  looks at the Trump state visit in Beijing. While Trump was losing his poker game, he should have been playing Pokémon, he explains in the Wire China.

Victor Shih:

It is not entirely wrong to think of Great Power politics as a card game, as Trump at times does. However, it is not a poker game, where hands are dealt randomly, and players both try to read the cards held by other players and, at times, bluff their way to victory.

The card game of geopolitics is in fact more akin to the Pokemon card game, where players still need to guess or collect intelligence on a competitor’s hand, but have much more discretion than in poker to expend resources and make tradeoffs in order to build the best position they can relative to their competitors.

The evidence on display in Beijing last week was that China has done this expertly — while the Trump administration still needs to realize that they are not even playing the right card game.

More at the Wire China.

Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How China won the Trump visit in Beijing – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Business analyst Shaun Rein looks back at the Trump visit in Beijing and explains why China has been the winner of this historic get-together, he tells George Galloway. He explains why China will never buy US technology anymore

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Trump has no credibility in Beijing – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein explains at CNBC why we cannot expect too much from the ongoing meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Trump has no credibility at all in Beijing, he says.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

What Western e-commerce can learn from China – Bjorn Ognibeni

 

Bjorn Ognibeni

Practical visionair and ChinaBriefs author Bjorn Ognibeni speaks at the E-commerce expo 2026 in Berlin about what Western e-commerce companies can learn from China. While Silicon Valley perfects Agentic AI demos, Chinese platforms are already deploying AI at scale – and making money doing it, he tells his audience

Bjorn Ognibeni is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

EV showrooms give way to emotional value – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

China’s shopping malls illustrate a profound change in consumer sentiment as EV showrooms are replaced by new features giving way to emotional value, says consumer expert Ashley Dudarenok in the Jing Daily.

Ashley Dudarenok:

When an EV showroom closes, it is increasingly being replaced by a brand selling something entirely intangible: emotional value.

Pop Mart, the Beijing-based designer toy maker, is aggressively expanding its physical footprint, moving from automated vending machines and small kiosks into massive, experiential ground-floor flagships. The financial backing for this expansion is staggering. In late March 2026, Pop Mart reported that its full-year 2025 revenue had surged by nearly 185% to RMB 37.1 billion ($5.4 billion), driven largely by the global phenomenon of its Labubu character series.

More at the Jing Daily.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more consumer experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

China tries to close Singapore route for AI developments – Winston Ma

 

Winston ma

China is trying to close a route for Chinese companies to work through Singapore to collaborate with the US, says political analyst Winston Ma, author of The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace, to Newsweek. By banning Meta from purchasing AI startup Manus, China wants to avoid national security issues on AI and other Chinese innovations, he adds.

Newsweek:

The exit bans send a message—that any AI company founded in China, with business operations still in the country, are likewise reachable by Beijing, Ke Yan, head of Singapore’s DZT Research, told Newsweek.

Beijing’s regulators then treat the deal as a technology export, arguing that the team, model weights, and training data were developed in China, regardless of where the company is legally based.

“Once they were physically in China, Singapore’s corporate domicile became irrelevant,” he said.

Beijing is most concerned on whether strategically sensitive technologies developed in China—and the talent and data behind them—continue to be transferred offshore through corporate restructuring in Singapore, Winston Ma, New York University law school adjunct professor and the author of The Digital War, told Newsweek.

The Chinese authorities have made clear this “Singapore washing” will not automatically insulate any deal from government oversight, Ma stated.

“The real challenge is defining what counts as ‘strategic’ in a fast-moving AI landscape—much like how TikTok’s seemingly goofy videos initially appeared far removed from national security concerns—until their underlying data and algorithmic power came into sharper focus.”

More at Newsweek.

Winston Ma is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

The differences between Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

China’s leading e-commerce firm, Alibaba, runs two different retail platforms. Consumer expert Ashley Dudarenok explains on her website how both platforms, while owned by the same company, differ profoundly in their approaches.

Ashley Dudarenok:

Tmall vs Taobao describes the two primary retail platforms inside Alibaba’s ecommerce ecosystem. Taobao operates as a discovery marketplace where consumers explore products and compare sellers. Tmall functions as a brand-controlled retail platform where verified flagship stores convert that discovery into trusted purchases.

Search interest around Tmall vs Taobao often assumes the two platforms compete for the same role inside China’s e-commerce market. In reality, Alibaba structured them as complementary layers within a unified commerce system.

Much more at Ashley Dudarenok’s website.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more consumer experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

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