/PRZWT/The 2025 Yunqi Conference was held in Yunqi Town, Hangzhou from September 24th to 26th. With the theme of "Cloud and Intelligence Integration, Carbon and Silicon Coexistence", the conference featured three main forums and over 110 aggregated topics, attracting more than 2,000 guests from over 50 countries.
At this cutting-edge global event on the development of the AI industry, Semir, as a client of Alibaba Cloud, was invited to attend. On September 26th, the event was themed "Intelligence Inspires the Future · Ecosystem Building Together At the "Enterprise Intelligence and AI Application Innovation Forum", Lu Lina, Senior Director of Semir Digital Center, shared "Reconstructing the Value Chain with AI: Semir's Retail Full-Stack Efficiency Revolution", revealing to the attendees how this traditional clothing enterprise has achieved full-chain digital transformation through AI technology.
After the speech, Semir and Alibaba Cloud held an "AI Full-stack Strategy Signing Ceremony", marking a new stage in their cooperation. This strategic cooperation will cover the full-stack AI capability building from infrastructure to application scenarios, providing stronger technical support for Semir's digital transformation. This signing ceremony marks an upgrade of the cooperation between the two sides from a single project to comprehensive ecological cooperation. According to the agreement, Alibaba Cloud will provide Semir with comprehensive AI technical support, including computing power resources, model training, platform architecture, and joint application development, to jointly promote the digital transformation of the clothing industry.
Strategic understanding: AI is a top-priority project led by the top leader.
At Semir, the AI transformation is regarded as a "top-priority project", with everyone from the chairman to the heads of each business division having to "get involved personally". This top-down promotion breaks the traditional mindset that "AI is the business of technicians", ensuring that business leaders become the core drivers of AI applications.
At the beginning of this year, Qiu Jianqiang, the chairman of Semir Co., LTD., pointed out in his internal open letter titled "To Change and to the Future" that "in the surging tide of digitalization, AI is not a multiple-choice question but a survival question." At present, the application rate of AI in Semir's key AIGC business has reached nearly 90%, and the efficiency in some core scenarios has increased by more than 30%.
To ensure that the transformation of AI is carried out in an orderly manner, Semir has established a five-level progressive implementation system covering strategy, tactics, culture, organization and value.
Based on technology, build full-stack AI capabilities for retail
Semir has built a "three verticals and three horizontals" full-stack AI capability system for retail, identifying "demands" and "constants" amid changes. The "Three verticals" penetrate three core value chains: commodities, supply chains and retail. The "three Horizontals" refer to the three major middle platforms that support the free flow of data - the business middle platform, the data middle platform, and the AI middle platform.
In the field of supply chain, Semir's practical achievements are particularly remarkable. The core breakthrough lies in the dual empowerment of the R&D process and the terminal new product launch process by AI technology and 3D technology, which has successfully shortened the product development cycle of 8 to 9 months under the traditional model to just 15 days. This leapfrog improvement in efficiency is precisely due to the in-depth integration and comprehensive application of AI and 3D technologies in key links of the supply chain.
Organizational transformation, from "Fear of AI" to "AI for All"
Semir's digital transformation is not merely a technological upgrade, but a profound reshaping of its organizational structure and corporate culture. Since 2023, Semir has taken the lead in exploring AI applications starting with "interest groups", and then gradually upgraded to company-level project teams to promote practice. In just three years, "AI for All" has transformed from an initial concept and slogan into a regular practice in the daily work of Semir's over 3,000 employees.
Semir's corporate culture clearly emphasizes: enhancing core capabilities with AI, getting rid of technical anxiety, and regarding AI as a "sharp tool" available to all employees. It also highlights that AI is not "their" business or a task "I have to do", but "our" business and an opportunity "I want to do", demonstrating a high regard for AI and the concept of full participation by all employees.
The AI aggregation force platform drives a revolution in business scenario efficiency
Semir is building an AI aggregation force platform (i.e. "Dasen 3.0") based on Alibaba Cloud's full-stack AI capabilities. In multiple core application scenarios, this platform has specifically deployed various types of AI models, including: Language and code generation models (Qwen3-30B-A3B, Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B), retrieval and embedding models (Qwen3-Rerank-8B, Qwen3-Embedding 8B), cross-modal generation models (image/video direction: (Wan2.1-T2V-14B, Wan2.2-T2V-14B), forming a full-scenario AI capability support covering text, code, images, and videos.
In the collaboration between Semir and Alibaba Cloud, the two parties not only collectively empower each other at the technical tool level but also lay a solid digital foundation for the evolution of enterprise intelligence. This platform covers four major levels: scene center, application center, model center and infrastructure, supporting five major business areas including product design and development, supply chain management, retail management, sales and marketing, as well as organization and support.
It is reported that in the field of marketing, text-to-image technology has been widely applied in various brands under Semir. Specifically, from the conceptual conception stage of marketing content, AI is utilized to output creative directions. After entering the visual implementation stage, background images are generated through AI to effectively meet the needs of extreme shooting scenarios (such as special scene replication, urgent image generation, etc.). Currently, all the hot posters of the official account of the Balabala brand under its umbrella have been created by AI. This technology can design diversified creative visual expressions for various functional products of the brand based on the theme characteristics of different festivals, precisely matching the needs of marketing scenarios.
The industry impact: Semir's digitalization achievements have drawn attention from peers
After the meeting, many enterprise leaders in the clothing industry contacted Semir through Alibaba, hoping to further exchange experiences on digitalization practices. This phenomenon fully attests to Semir's leading position in digital practices within the industry. The reason why it has attracted widespread attention lies in the fact that Semir's digitalization is not just at the conceptual level of conception, but has been implemented and has accumulated mature experience with substantive results.
As a leading enterprise in the clothing industry chain, Semir actively plays the leading role of a "chain master", driving the development of upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry chain in a dual-wheel manner with "industrial collaboration + resource sharing". By establishing long-term and stable cooperative relationships with fabric suppliers and accessory manufacturers, it implements the business philosophy of "When the small river is full, the big river is full". We should effectively promote the overall digitalization level of the industrial chain.
At the 2025 Yunqi Conference, whether it was the forum sharing session or the interactive activities in the exhibition area, the most notable feature was the concentrated outbreak of agents from various industries. This phenomenon clearly demonstrates that AI technology has been deeply integrated with the physical world and is continuously driving changes in the field of productivity.
Facing the rapid development trend of AI technology, Semir has clearly defined the core response direction of the enterprise: "Digital power will become the key 'multiplier' for brand power, product power and retail power." AI is by no means merely a tool for enhancing operational efficiency; it is the core driving force for reshaping the industrial value chain and reconfiguring the human-machine collaboration model.
It is precisely this deep integration of technological application and conceptual innovation that has enabled Semir to not only adhere to the core original intention of the brand but also gain unprecedented growth momentum in the wave of AI development, thereby providing a successful model for the transformation practice of traditional clothing enterprises in the intelligent era that can be referred to.
