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Eunice Xu

Traditional corporate culture and hierarchies are slowing down artificial intelligence adoption in Chinese enterprises, leaving them trailing their US peers, even as China’s savvy consumers embrace AI agents at a breakneck pace, says Zack Kass, former head of go-to-market at OpenAI.
China has a very “techno-centric consumer”, while the US has a very “techno-centric enterprise”, Kass told the South China Morning Post in a recent interview.
Highlighting this contrast, Kass said typical Chinese consumers were more tech-savvy than their American counterparts, showing enthusiasm for emerging innovations largely absent in the US market. He attributed this positive relationship with technology to its role in lifting the country out of poverty and building the nation’s middle class.
Kass worked at OpenAI from 2021 to 2023, during which the company launched its groundbreaking chatbot, ChatGPT, in November 2022. He now runs his own consultancy.
“The American consumer is far more cynical about technology and big tech,” said Kass, citing anxieties over social media’s impact on children and declining public trust. This cultural divergence, he said, helped explain the frenzy surrounding OpenClaw in China, even as it struggles to achieve the same scale and popularity in the US.

Last month, nearly 1,000 people gathered at Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters seeking free OpenClaw installations, while local social media platforms were flooded with services charging up to several hundred yuan to install it.
The craze also sparked a buying frenzy on mainland Chinese stock markets and drove up prices of Apple’s Mac Mini across China. The device, with its affordable price and robust performance, has emerged as an ideal dedicated machine for running OpenClaw and other AI agents.
In contrast, Kass said American enterprises were adopting AI agents more quickly than Chinese firms and actively rewarding talented developers. “Most Chinese enterprises are not rapidly adopting AI the way they should,” he said, pointing to conservative, highly hierarchical corporate cultures that relied on rigid, top-down decision-making that left middle managers without the influence needed to drive technological change.
China’s advantage, however, lay in its ability to centralise strategic efforts and consistently produce affordable innovations, according to Kass. While the US relied on decentralised, free-market experimentation that produced high-variance results with distinct winners and losers, China had “centralised its attempt to build infrastructure”, Kass said, calling it “a pretty decent bet”.
The US and China are locked in a fierce AI race, with the US dominating high-end proprietary models. In response to US export controls on advanced chips, Chinese developers have pioneered low-cost, open-source alternatives. Both countries are pouring billions of dollars into chip development and expanding AI data centres, recognising that advanced computing power is the foundation of technological dominance.
Kass said China had a unique ability to “drive down the cost of goods and services” for consumers, adding that such progress and efficiency often went unnoticed in the US. A mix of geopolitical friction and lack of first-hand experience had left Silicon Valley largely in the dark regarding Chinese AI, Kass added.
Because American tech professionals rarely visit China and major US firms generally block the use of popular models like Kimi from Moonshot AI or DeepSeek, Kass said the industry lacked a hands-on understanding of China’s capabilities and relied instead on abstract benchmarks. By contrast, Kass said China maintained a much firmer grasp of Silicon Valley’s developments.
Despite geopolitical narratives, Kass said the culture parallels between the two countries were frequently overlooked, particularly their shared appetite for rapid development and consumerism. Kass said there were “a ton of similarities culturally” between the two nations, adding that the dynamic was “totally misunderstood”.


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China’s tech-savvy consumers embrace AI, but rigid corporate hierarchies hold back enterprises, Zack Kass says


China’s tech-savvy consumers embrace AI, but rigid corporate hierarchies hold back enterprises, Zack Kass says.


Chinese firms trail US peers in AI adoption due to corporate culture: ex-OpenAI executive

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}China’s tech-savvy consumers embrace AI, but rigid corporate hierarchies hold back enterprises, Zack Kass says

China’s tech-savvy consumers embrace AI, but rigid corporate hierarchies hold back enterprises, Zack Kass says