Ho Chi Minh City, August 2026— Vietnamese businesses are moving beyond AI experimentation. Across manufacturing, retail, finance, and logistics, more enterprises are now looking for practical ways to deploy the technology at scale and generate measurable business value.
That shift was on full display at The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Chapter 4 (TFOAI4) in Ho Chi Minh City, where Alibaba Cloud brought their latest AI technologies and expertise to an audience of more than 1,000 business decision-makers.
As the event’s Diamond Sponsor, Alibaba Cloud’s vision and participation also reflects their long-term commitment to Southeast Asia. They have been investing in local infrastructure, talent and partnerships across the region for years, with Vietnam being one of the markets where they see the strongest appetite for turning generative AI, agentic AI and industry-specific models into production systems.
From Foundation Model to the Flow of Work
TFOAI4 attendees exploring Alibaba Cloud’s AI technologies and their applications (Photo: JDI)
What set Alibaba Cloud’s session apart was their completeness. Rather than presenting a single product, they walked the audience through an entire enterprise AI architecture, layer by layer, and showed how each layer connects to the one above it.
At the model layer, they showcased Qwen, their family of open and proprietary foundation models — including multimodal, coding, and reasoning variants — which are now among the most widely adopted open-source models globally, given that Qwen can be fine-tuned and deployed across specific languages and industry-specific scenarios.
On the platform side, they demonstrated QwenCloud and Model Studio for building, fine-tuning, and deploying agents; and their elastic GPU infrastructure for scaling training and inference.
At the application layer, Alibaba Cloud showcased use cases informed by Alibaba Group’s own deployments across Taobao, Tmall, and Cainiao logistics. These included agentic workflows in enterprise sales, HR, and finance; AI-driven e-commerce and manufacturing; smart-city solutions; and predictive supply chain applications.
Shaping the Next Chapter of Enterprise AI
Anchoring Alibaba Cloud’s presence at TFOAI4 was a firsthand look at their latest product launches — Qwen3.8-Max, Qoder, and QwenWork — each representing a different layer of enterprise AI and together illustrating where AI is heading and what “business impact” looks like in 2026 and beyond.
Qwen3.8-Max is the newest flagship of the Qwen family, engineered for frontier-level reasoning, long-context understanding, multilingual performance, and tool use. It already powers many of Alibaba Cloud’s most demanding enterprise workloads, and it handles real-world Vietnamese and ASEAN-language tasks — from complex document analysis to multi-step agent work — at the accuracy and latency that production systems demand. For a region long served by models trained primarily on English, that matters enormously.
Qoder, their AI-native coding agent, takes the next step. It moves software teams beyond autocomplete into genuine agentic development: reading a repository, planning changes across multiple files, executing tasks, and collaborating with human engineers as a teammate rather than a tool. For Vietnam’s fast-growing developer community, and for the many enterprises now modernising legacy systems, Qoder is a clear signal of where software engineering productivity is heading over the next 24 months.
QwenWork completes the picture. An AI workspace for knowledge workers, it brings Qwen’s intelligence directly into the daily rhythm of the job — research, writing, data analysis, slide and document creation, cross-application automation — as an agentic desktop assistant that is always on. It is the most concrete answer anyone offered at TFOAI4 to the event’s “Work 4.0” theme: the moment AI stops being a chatbot in a browser tab and becomes a colleague embedded in the flow of work.
Taken together, the three launches tell a single, coherent story: a world-class foundation model, an agent for how software gets built, and an agent for how work gets done. Very few companies in the world can speak credibly to all three layers at once.
Business leaders connecting with Alibaba Cloud experts to discover Qwen3.8-Max (Photo: JDI)
Alibaba Cloud’s Vision: Turning AI Ambition Into A Reality
Alibaba Cloud’s presence at TFOAI4 went beyond showcasing technology. For the leaders, founders and investors in the room, they offered a frame. The organisations that win this next phase of AI, they argued, will not be those with the most ambitious pilots, but those that build with rigour — combining strong data foundations, the right model choices, disciplined governance, and a clear path to business outcomes.
For companies ready to start on that road, Alibaba Cloud also brought a concrete entry point. Through the AI Catalyst program, they offer practical support to help AI-native companies move from experimentation to production:
- Up to 2 billion free tokens
- Up to US$120,000 in additional AI credits
- 1:1 office hours with AI experts
- Direct access to Alibaba Cloud’s model teams
- Early access to new model releases
- Introductions and co-marketing opportunities across Alibaba Cloud’s network
The program is open to unlisted companies founded within the last ten years that build AI as core technology — a five-minute application, reviewed in four to five business days.
For the founders, investors and business leaders at TFOAI4, this makes Alibaba Cloud’s vision and commitment to Southeast Asia more tangible. It is not simply about encouraging companies to experiment with AI, but helping them build the capabilities, infrastructure and partnerships needed to turn those experiments into scalable solutions.
→ Learn More About Alibaba Cloud: https://www.alibabacloud.com/
→ Learn More About the Qwen Family: https://www.qwencloud.com/
→ Apply to the AI Catalyst Program: https://qwencloud.com/promo/aicatalyst
