Zhou Yuxiang hired food delivery riders to sell AI to factories. Now he’s chasing China’s industrial AI breakthrough

When Zhou Yuxiang founded Black Lake Technologies, he did what seemed sensible: he trusted experience, hiring salespeople from traditional Western software companies like SAP and Siemens. But as the Shanghai-based AI startup moved from enterprise clients to China’s smaller factories—some four million of them—those polished professionals proved useless.

“They couldn’t even figure out how to get into the factory, past the security guard and the guard dogs,” Zhou recalled in an interview with Fortune during the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8.

So Zhou recruited his sales team from a different labor pool: food delivery riders. Couriers from Meituan and Alibaba’s Ele.me “have the best, you know, street-smart wisdom to meet the decision makers,” he explained. Drivers knew the back entrances, the factory layouts, and the best path to the boss of a mom-and-pop workshop.

Still, what these drivers had in chutzpah, they lacked in actual product knowledge. So Zhou put every new hire through what he called a “devil boot camp”: five days of 14-hour training sessions, a daily exam, and one contract closed over the phone by the final day. Only about half graduated.

Zhou, a Dartmouth grad and former investment banker, is now betting that the most interesting market for AI isn’t the consumer smartphone nor the corporate office, but rather the shop floor. Black Lake’s product is factory-management software: a cloud-based system that tracks orders, schedules, materials, and output—and, more recently, AI agents that can read an incoming order, generate a quote, and schedule production on their own. Black Lake says it has been profitable since 2025 and that revenue has grown more than 60% a year.

China is the testing ground for that idea. It is also, so far, an unproven one. Zhou’s larger wager isn’t just that AI can make existing work faster, but also that it can restructure how an industry operates. 

He doesn’t believe........

© Fortune