June 23, 2026, (Inside AI) — Alibaba Group is leaning on agricultural metaphors to rally its workforce around a grueling AI push. In an internal blog post published Monday, senior executive Liu Zhenfei urged employees to embrace patience and persistence, drawing lessons from a recent rice-planting team-building event attended by founder Jack Ma and other top leaders.
The gathering, held at an undisclosed location, saw roughly a dozen executives—including E-commerce Business Group CEO Jiang Fan, chief people officer Jane Fang Jiang, Ant Group chairman Eric Xiandong Jing, and CEO Cyril Xinyi Han—spend a morning manually transplanting rice seedlings. Liu, an Alibaba partner and chairman of mapping service Amap, described the labor as humbling and symbolic.
He wrote: “A dozen or so of us worked all morning, yet we only managed to plant half an acre of paddy field crookedly.”
The event comes as Alibaba sharpens its artificial intelligence strategy, pouring resources into large language models, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise AI tools. Liu’s post framed the company’s AI ambitions through the lens of farming rhythms.
He added: “The laws of the fields are very simple: when the season arrives, you must plant when it's time to plant, and endure when it's time to endure.”
Liu stressed that success requires meticulous groundwork, not just speed. “As long as you tend to the soil, choose the right seedlings, and do every little thing with care, just leave the rest to time. The land will never let you down,” he wrote.
The messaging signals a cultural shift inside Alibaba, which has faced fierce competition from Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent in China’s AI race. By invoking endurance, leadership appears to be preparing teams for a long-term investment cycle rather than quick wins.
Analysts note that the rice-planting metaphor also echoes Jack Ma’s past emphasis on agrarian values—hard work, humility, and respect for natural cycles—as a counterweight to tech industry burnout. The event’s timing aligns with Alibaba’s recent restructuring into six business units, a move designed to make each unit more agile and accountable in pursuing AI-driven growth.
Alibaba’s cloud division has been aggressively expanding its ModelScope platform, which hosts hundreds of open-source AI models, while its Tongyi Qianwen LLM family now powers chatbots, coding assistants, and enterprise analytics. Yet the company trails in consumer mindshare, where Baidu’s Ernie Bot and ByteDance’s Doubao dominate.
Liu’s post did not mention specific AI projects, but his emphasis on “choosing the right seedlings” may hint at Alibaba’s selective approach to AI bets—focusing on verticals like logistics, e-commerce personalization, and cloud services where it already holds data advantages.
The team-building exercise itself is part of a broader trend among Chinese tech firms using manual labor retreats to foster resilience. Competitor Huawei has long sent new hires to work in rural areas, while Tencent has organized farming camps for managers. Critics argue such events are performative, but internal Alibaba reactions on the intranet were reportedly positive, with employees praising the leadership’s willingness to get their hands dirty.
Whether the call for endurance translates into tangible AI breakthroughs remains uncertain. Alibaba’s stock has been volatile amid regulatory shifts and macroeconomic headwinds, but its R&D spending on AI continues to rise. The company recently disclosed plans to invest over $30 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure over the next five years.
For now, Liu’s message is clear: Alibaba’s AI harvest will take time, and the company must cultivate its field with patience—crooked rows and all.
