Black Lake CEO’s strategy to sell AI solutions to factories: turn to food couriers

When Zhou Yuxiang, founder and CEO of Shanghai-headquartered Black Lake Technologies, wanted to sell his artificial intelligence (AI) automation solutions to millions of family-run factories across China, he came up with an unconventional strategy: hiring food delivery workers to make sales.His entire sales team, hired from various industrial cities, survived a gruelling five-day boot camp on articulating how AI can solve specific manufacturing pain points.“They are very street-smart,” the 36-year-old said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post. “Good college graduates are often thin-skinned. They linger in front of a factory and can’t get in.“But for food delivery guys, they just give a cigarette to the security guard and get in … They can also bypass guard dogs, or find a back door to get into a factory to meet the owner because they deliver food.”With a sales force of more than 420 delivery workers, Black Lake, established in 2016, has grown to serve 35,000 factory clients, 95 per cent of which are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).The International Data Corporation also ranks it as mainland China’s top provider of cloud-based production management software.Hong Kong ‘very attractive’ for next step