AI changed the agency job. We rebuilt the group around it.
AI is changing the way everything gets made: strategy, content, media, websites, commerce. An agency that treats it as a side project is quoting yesterday's prices for yesterday's work.
AI is now our core engine.
We advise on it.
We use it every day.
We live on it.
We grow on it with our clients.
We have no AI department, because we have no non-AI department. Every brief in this group, from a Tmall flagship launch to a LinkedIn program, runs through the same stack we sell.
Nobody argues anymore about whether AI belongs in marketing. The biggest advertisers are building the capability in-house and repricing the work. The open question is what an agency does with the hours it gives back.
of marketers use generative AI as of Q1 2026, up from 51% two years earlier
Salesforce State of Marketing 2026
cut in advertising production time and cost at Nestlé, scaling AI digital twins
Nvidia, 2026
generative AI users in China by December 2025, up 141.7% in one year
CNNIC, February 2026
cheaper: what open Chinese models can run versus leading Western ones
OpenRouter data via CNBC, July 2026
Unilever now produces brand imagery twice as fast at half the cost using AI and digital twins.
More with less
A small senior team with a full AI stack now does what used to take departments: research, positioning, copy in the client's languages, design systems, video, working code. We do not bill hours for work machines finish in minutes. Scopes and retainers are priced on outcomes and volume, not headcount.
Faster
Work that took a quarter now takes weeks, and the weeks are turning into days. Production is rarely the bottleneck now. Approval is. So we rebuilt our review loops along with our production, on a single weekly cadence wherever a client lets us.
More audiences
When the cost of one more variant collapses, markets that never justified the budget suddenly do. More languages. More platforms and formats than the old budget ever covered. A mid-size brand can now run a multi-market program that used to require a holding company.
Localization used to be the expensive part of entering China or leaving it. Now the expensive part is judgment: which platform, which claim, which price, which partner. That is the part we sell, and the part we do not hand to a machine.
- GPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Qwen
- DeepSeek
- Doubao
- Kimi
Two AI ecosystems are growing up on either side of the wall. Our AI teams benchmark them against each other on real tasks, month after month, because the ranking does not hold still. We hold no allegiance to either side. We pick whatever wins the task at a price the market can carry. The same neutrality applies to our advice. We take Western brands into China and Chinese brands into the West, and we sit on both sides of the wall while we do it.
The longer version of this argument is on the bridge.None of this is theory. Here is where it runs.
AI Services
The stack itself: AI consulting, our Intelligence platform, AIGC production, and LinkedIn B2B, from strategy through production.
Cross-Border Marketing
The stack under market pressure: five agencies carrying brands between China and the West, in both directions, every day.
Products
The stack with our own money at stake: media and software we own and operate.
Whatever we recommend to a client has already run on our own business. If it breaks, it breaks on us first.
The mechanics are on how we work.
BearingBridge is founded and led by Cyril Drouin. Digital, eCommerce, and brand, across Europe and North Asia. Former Chief Digital and eCommerce Officer, Publicis Groupe North Asia. Founder of BysoftChina. He rebuilt this group around AI because he has watched every previous platform shift punish the agencies that moved last.
Connect on LinkedInShanghai · Hong Kong · Singapore · Paris · Hangzhou, with in-market reps in the US, UK, Germany, and France.
We work in English, French, Spanish, German, and Chinese, on a working day that overlaps China and Europe.
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