Sorry Alibaba Cloud but your press release “Alibaba Cloud Unveils Advanced Agentic AI Ecosystem for Global Customers”, read like a master class for budding marketers on how NOT to promote AI. Let me break down what was so awful with this announcement.
Stuffed with AI buzzwords that literally don’t mean anything.
Here are just a few – “Advanced agentic AI ecosystem”, “Agentic era”, “Full stack AI ecosystem”, “AI native platform”, “Agentic cloud infrastructure”
No depth is provided to these terms, rather they are sprinkled across the announcement, hoping to add flavour rather than create substance. Each term needs clarification in its own right, but that is never given.
Note to marketers, we may be in the AI era, but wise words of people from long past still hold true. Shakespeare told us in Hamlet “The lady doth protest too much” — and in this context, the more loudly something is proclaimed as revolutionary, the more justified readers are in questioning whether it really is. I had hit my AI fill by about the second paragraph of this announcement.
Annoyingly, there is little substance to show what this plethora of “AI” stuff is actually doing beyond what was already being achieved with automation and ML in the non-agentic era. I suspect in practice the “paradigm shift” is more of a slow adoption of some AI layered over existing automation. Based on this announcement, none of us can really know. What would have helped is a concrete example showing a real workflow that was previously impossible, now made viable specifically because of agentic behaviour.
Still using “nothing burger” words and terms.
I think the term “Paradigm Shift” hit number one spot in “bull-sh*t bingo” many years ago, so my eyes couldn’t roll much further into my skull when I saw it being used in this press announcement. Even more unforgivable given that this leader in AI couldn’t use its own AI to suggest 25 alternatives to the term paradigm shift — all of which would have been less cringeworthy.
So here is a small tip for the Ali PR team: actually, USE agentic AI to create, edit and refine your press releases, and at no charge here is some AI consulting from me — add an iterative step in your workflow that checks draft copy for cringeworthy, outdated PR terms.
Still using speeds and feeds to garner credibility.
If you have paid attention to the AI mantra, we have moved beyond the era of product features and performance stats. The world we build with AI is meant to be goal‑driven. We no longer define how to solve a problem; we define the outcome we want and AI gets us there.
Old credibility signals were about benchmarks and rankings. New credibility signals should be about outcomes, decisions improved, and costs avoided. Yet this announcement falls back into the same old traps: “ranked 5th globally”, “achieved a score of 56.6”, “competitive with leading players like Chat GPT and Claude”.
Arrgghhhh — we have moved on. Please Alibaba, if you are leading the way in experiential AI, then show your credibility by telling us about “user outcomes”, “business decision quality”, and maybe even “the cost of long‑running agents”.
Bottom line — if you claim to be an AI leader, then you need to talk the language. Jettison the speeds and feeds. AI is now about experience and outcomes, yet in this announcement Ali seems unable to move away from old‑style benchmark scorecards in a bid to prove credibility.
Government linkage straight out of the curry favour playbook.
If you follow go‑to‑market plans of large Chinese tech companies when they work in foreign countries, they often build strong, deep, and very high‑level government relationships. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this approach — it’s a legitimate way to embed into foreign markets, aligning with government priorities, workforce upskilling, and national digital agendas.
But here’s the thing: in this press release (and as is often the case), it is presented as altruism rather than what it really is — a thought‑through GTM plan.
Marketing people should realise that these days their target audience is sophisticated. We understand that initiatives like “educating 1000 SMEs” are as much about lubricating market entry and garnering regulatory goodwill as they are about genuine altruism.
All of this is actually fine (in my view), but don’t dumb down your audience — describe it for what it really is.
Finally, as a little bit of fun, I used AI to play a bit of buzzword bingo with this press release — here is what it turned out for me 😊.
Buzzword Bingo: Alibaba Cloud “Agentic AI Ecosystem” Edition
Buzzword → Status
Agentic → ✅✅✅ (bonus points for overuse) Agentic era → ✅ Paradigm shift → ✅ Full stack AI → ✅ AI native platform → ✅ Seamless integration → ✅ Empowering users → ✅ Ecosystem → ✅ Long horizon execution → ✅ Autonomous → ✅ Product level agents → ✅ Skills initiative → ✅ SME enablement → ✅ Global customers → ✅
If this is what the “agentic era” means to Alibaba cloud , then the first thing they should automate is the AI Press release process!
