Some evenings teach you more about the world in three hours than six months of watching from the sidelines. The dinner-debate hosted by Club Panda & Coq at restaurant Bayan was one of them. Laurent Peruget, Managing Director of Dirox, joined a room of decision-makers, entrepreneurs and keen observers of the China-Europe relationship.

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The guest of honour, Stéphanie Zhou, founder of LUVINNOV Consulting and a recognised authority on digital transformation between the two continents, did not come to reassure. She came to lay out the evidence.

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A gap no longer measured in years, but in weeks

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The numbers set the scene without ceremony. In 2024, China invested 47 billion dollars in artificial intelligence. It holds 35% of the world's AI patents and counts over 400 million monthly active users on platforms with embedded AI. On the other side, fewer than 30% of European companies deploy AI at scale.

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But the real divide is not financial. It is cultural. In China, the cycle from idea to deployment is measured in weeks. In Europe, in months, when the project survives the next steering committee at all. There, AI is the engine of the business model. Here, it remains a support tool.

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Use cases that speak in results

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Stéphanie Zhou's presentation gave substance to this reality. At Alibaba, AI drives product recommendation, dynamic pricing and automated customer service — delivering measured conversion increases of 20 to 30%. On Douyin, ByteDance's algorithm personalises the experience from the very first seconds, capturing over 90 minutes of daily attention per active user. In manufacturing, predictive maintenance and supply chain optimisation cut operational costs by as much as 15%.

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These are not prototypes. They are systems in production, continuously iterated across user bases counted in billions.

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Europe holds strong cards — if it chooses to play them

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Yet this is not a story of inevitable defeat. Europe possesses rare assets: world-class academic research, brands with deep reserves of consumer trust, and a regulatory framework — the AI Act — that could become a genuine differentiator in third markets seeking AI that is neither American nor Chinese. The most promising sectors for China-Europe collaboration? Green tech, Industry 4.0, agri-tech, and emerging markets as shared testing grounds.

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But the window is closing. As Stéphanie Zhou made clear, the obstacle is no longer technological, it is organisational. Companies want AI, budgets exist, yet implementation stalls against a shortage of operational skills and a culture that struggles to embrace rapid iteration.

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Dirox has operated at the crossroads of technology cultures since 2003 — with teams in France, Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States. This ability to embed local context from day one of a project, what we call Smartsourcing, is precisely what turns an AI ambition into an operational deployment. When the gap between strategy and execution widens, that is where the bridge is built.

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