In her previous role as chief of staff at the North American branch of the massive e-commerce retailer Alibaba, Julia Xu witnessed firsthand the challenges that come with sourcing product internationally.
That experience is what inspired her and her co-founder Mandy Chow to start Wayo (asi/95654), a promo supplier built on making overseas sourcing more accessible through artificial intelligence, one of the hottest topics in promo right now.
In this week’s episode of Promo Insiders, Xu discusses the AI model that’s powering Wayo with ASI Media’s Hannah Rosenberger, and how it helps to eliminate some of the challenges of working with the international supply chain, including matching clients with factories and quickly providing quotes based on information in their database.
“We have this database of all the factories,” Xu said. “We know that Factory A is a high-quality one, Factory B is a standard one, C is a cheap one, depending on what you need. And when you’re chatting with our AI sourcing agent, it will actually recommend a factory to go with based on your use case, your quality, your requirements.”
Podcast Chapters
1:15: Starting Wayo
3:24: How AI Helps With Sourcing
13:02: Saving Time
16:52: Why “Wayo?”
