Claire Chen is the Co-Founder and COO of Clobotics, a global leader in intelligent computer vision solutions for the wind power and retail industries. With headquarter in Singapore, Clobotics also has key global entities in Seattle, Esbjerg, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo. Claire oversees the company's overall sales and marketing strategy, business operations, and people-related initiatives.
Before founding Clobotics, Claire served as Vice President of Business Development at EHang, where she also led the company's North American operations. EHang went public on the Nasdaq (EH) in December 2019.
Claire spent a decade with Microsoft, where she held several leadership roles, most recently as Director of Business Operations in the Cloud and Enterprise Division, responsible for launching the Windows Azure and Office 365 businesses in China. Earlier, she was part of Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services team, managing a budget of over $1 billion for global infrastructure expansion.
A graduate of Shanghai International Studies University with a major in International Accounting, Claire has been recognized as a distinguished figure in the World Innovators Summit (WIM). Her accolades include "Forbes Top 20 Women of Potential in Business 2020," "Top 20 Female Entrepreneurs in China 2021," "Hu Run Innovator of the Year 2021," and "Fortune MPW China's Most Influential Women in Business 2021."
According to NielsenIQ, in China's fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retail market, "traditional channels" such as hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores, and grocery stores still account for about 70% of the market share. While emerging channels like snack warehouses, O2O, and community group buying are growing rapidly, the digital and visual transformation of traditional channels remains one of the "core issues" most concerning FMCG brands.
On the other hand, traditional channels are also undergoing continuous changes with trends such as "de-KA (key accounts) transformation, promotion of direct sourcing, and shifting roles of distributors." For brand owners, the visibility, control, and scientific decision-making capability of traditional channels have become increasingly important for assessing the effectiveness of their channel market strategies. However, all of this depends on one key premise: the ability to see how traditional channel shelves look in detail, on a large scale, and in real-time, along with the changes occurring within them.
With the rapid development of technologies like AIGC (AI-generated content) and CV (Computer Vision), it is now becoming possible to transform the scattered channel locations into a digital management structure and to turn massive amounts of shelves into visualized representations.
At the same time, as technology takes over human time in these processes, the wide applicability of technology to complex scenarios, its recognition accuracy compared to manual efforts, and the convenience and feedback speed of the business flow are becoming key challenges in the visualization process.
In this discussion, Clobotics will join forces with digital international/local FMCG companies' CIOs or key business decision-makers to explore the digital and visual practices in traditional channels, how these practices are changing the operational models of FMCG traditional channels, and how they bring about transformation and efficiency gains. The conversation will also touch on the difficulties and hidden issues in the digital and visual transformation of traditional channels, along with possible solutions.