Alibaba Cloud SME AI Growth Day Vietnam 2026: From AI Demos to Real Adoption

After Qwen AI Build Day showed what Vietnam’s builders could create with Qwen, April 22 brought the conversation into a bigger room. Alibaba Cloud SME AI Growth Day Vietnam 2026 returned to Riverside Palace in Ho Chi Minh City with a broader audience of startups, developers, SMEs, enterprises, investors, and AI practitioners.

The event drew more than 650 registrations and over 300 curated participants. If the first day was about building enterprise-ready AI solutions, the second day was about adoption: how businesses can understand AI, apply it to real workflows, and move from early experiments to practical implementation.

The Opening Set the Tone

Jason Lin (Global AI Programs Marketing & GTM, Alibaba Cloud International), who helped shape the SME AI Growth Day series, opened the floor and framed the purpose behind the gathering. Laura Nguyen then shared GenAI Fund’s vision for Vietnam and the broader Southeast Asia AI ecosystem we are working to build.

The program continued with remarks from Lê Trường Duy, Director and Vice Chairman of the Management Board of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) in Ho Chi Minh City. His presence signaled that AI adoption in Vietnam is no longer just an industry topic. It is becoming part of a larger national conversation about productivity, competitiveness, and the future of work.

Practical Perspectives from Alibaba Cloud and Qwen

From there, Alibaba Cloud and Qwen leaders shared practical perspectives on AI adoption and infrastructure:

  • Peter Dang, Alibaba Cloud Vietnam, spoke on AI adoption for SMEs in Vietnam.
  • David Yam, Alibaba Cloud International, shared how businesses can build and scale AI with Qwen.
  • Mark Khaw, Alibaba Cloud International, discussed powering AI at scale.
  • Dr. Ferdin Joe John Joseph, Alibaba Cloud International, introduced Qoder and showed how AI can support real work.

The sessions helped connect the dots between AI tools, cloud infrastructure, and the everyday needs of growing businesses.

From Strategy to Production

The event also featured two panels that connected strategy with real business needs.

Together, the panels brought the conversation back to a practical question many companies are asking: how do we move beyond pilots and make AI useful inside real teams, products, and operations?

Hands-on with Qwen and Wan

The hands-on lab brought the conversation closer to execution. Participants worked through AI-assisted coding with Qwen and explored generative image and video creation with Wan.

Laptops were open, questions were practical, and people left with something they could connect back to their own work. That hands-on format mattered because AI adoption becomes easier when people can move from watching demos to building something themselves.

Giving the Build Day Winners a Bigger Stage

The four Qwen AI Build Day winners then took the main stage again, this time in front of a larger room of enterprise decision-makers:

  • 🚗 Mobility — Open Academy
  • 💰 Financial Services — VoiceIQ
  • 🏥 Healthcare — Body Graph Scan
  • 🏛️ Public Sector — GovFlow Agentic GraphRAG

These teams had already proven themselves during Build Day. On Growth Day, they gained a bigger audience and a clearer path toward business conversations.

What Day 2 Proved

Alibaba Cloud SME AI Growth Day Vietnam 2026 showed that Vietnam’s AI ecosystem is not only producing builders. It is also bringing together the enterprises, SMEs, investors, and technology partners needed to help those builders scale.

For GenAI Fund, this is the work: creating spaces where strong AI teams meet real business needs, and where global technology partners such as Alibaba Cloud and Qwen help local ecosystems build with world-class tools.

Two days at Riverside Palace made one thing clear. Vietnam’s AI ecosystem is taking shape, and the path from idea to enterprise deployment is becoming more real.

We are just getting started.

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