Fastlane partners with Baidu’s ERNIE Bot to bring AI technology into direct-to-consumer solutions

Shenzhen - February 22, 2023 - Fastlane Technology  (“Fastlane” -fstln.io), a global direct-to-consumer solution provider that accelerates the globalization of China-based and international brands through e-commerce announced it is joining the ecosystem of Baidu’s ERNIE Bot as a solution partner. 

Fastlane Technology will bring Baidu's top smart conversation technologies into its direct-to-consumer integrated solutions, ranging for brand strategy, digital operations and infrastructure development that facilitate the global expansion of innovative brands. This partnership is a new initiative in Fastlane’s ambition to revolutionize the way brands do cross-border ecommerce with the support of leading AI technology. 

Baidu has been actively investing in AI for more than a decade. ERNIE Bot was developed based on its industrial-level knowledge-enhanced ERNIE model, which is capable of deep semantic understanding and content generation across multiple modalities and languages, and has great potential in various fields such as question-and-answer search, content creation, and intelligent office. ERNIE Bot will access Baidu Smart Cloud, while in the future, it will be available through Baidu Smart Cloud to empower new kinds of applications. 

As an ecosystem partner, Fastlane will have priority access to ERNIE Bot for internal testing and will integrate Baidu’s leading AI technology into its integrated digital offerings. Moving forward, Fastlane will work together with Baidu to develop direct-to-consumer AI solutions that will address the current needs in the globalization of Chinese brands through cross-border ecommerce. 

Although the popularity of Chinese brands expanding globally continues to rise, they still face many challenges. While there are nearly 10,000 medium and large enterprises with annual revenues of more than 100 million U.S. dollars, only a few of them have truly gone overseas as "brands" and have achieved success. "Some companies, including large groups such as Huawei and Haier, innovative companies like DJI, and fast-fashion giant Shein, have enough resources, strong methodology and determination to build their own direct-to-consumer internal capability," says Fastlane co-founder and CEO Lucas Liao. “However, in recent years, a large number of small and medium-sized brand merchants who have gone overseas with the cross-border boom generally face a lack of professional talents, weak insight into the local market, and difficulty in coverage. The road to global markets still has great uncertainty."

Yongteng Wen, Vice President of Baidu Ventures, shared “Chinese brand internationalization and brand D2C are two directions with great potential in the field of cross-border e-commerce. Fastlane, as a leading one-stop service platform for brands going global, has accumulated a large number of industry best practice experiences and feedback from global customers, and built an excellent digital system on this basis. We believe that with the unremitting efforts of the entire team, Fastlane will continue to create more value for the globalization of Chinese brands and become an important player in the industry”.

The ERNIE Bot partner ecosystem has so far managed to attract leading technology companies such as iQiyi, Jidu Automobile, Kingdee Software, TCL, Lenovo Xiaoxin, Ctrip, Hongqi, Great Wall Motors, and Zhaopin.