There was a time when taking a Vietnamese business to the global market required almost everything a company didn’t have: larger teams, bigger budgets, years of market research, and a fair amount of trial and error. Scale was often the ultimate competitive advantage. Today, AI is changing that equation. Capabilities once reserved for large organizations are becoming accessible to businesses of every size, making competition less about scale and more about execution.
By closing the gap between large enterprises and smaller businesses, AI is reshaping how companies compete. It’s no longer just a tool, but increasingly becoming a co-founder.
That idea runs through the latest episode of Vietnam Innovators, featuring guests from Amazon Global Selling Vietnam, Amazon Ads, Thyoi, and Innovark Solutions. While AI is the starting point, the conversation points to something much bigger: if technology is making resources more accessible than ever, what will define competitive advantage in the years ahead?
Bridging The Gap Between Makers And Markets
For decades, manufacturing has been one of Vietnam’s greatest strengths. From textiles and electronics to furniture, millions of made in Vietnam products have reached global markets, positioning the country as a key player in international supply chains while helping local businesses build world-class production capabilities. Yet manufacturing has never been the whole story.
A dining table crafted in Ho Chi Minh City may end up in a family home in California, but under someone else’s brand. The product may travel thousands of miles, but customer insights rarely make the return journey. That’s because many Vietnamese manufacturers still operate as OEM suppliers, producing for international brands without ever engaging directly with end consumers. They know how to build great products. What they often lack is a direct understanding of the people buying them.
Ms. Nha Y, COO of Thyoi, a Vietnamese wooden indoor and outdoor furniture brand, sees the same pattern across Vietnam’s manufacturing sector. “Manufacturers know their products better than anyone”, she says. They understand the materials, the structure, and every step of the production process. Yet for years, many Vietnamese businesses have focused on contract manufacturing, producing to clients’ specifications rather than engaging directly with end customers. “When you don't truly understand your end customers, it’s incredibly difficult to create products they'll actually need”, she says.
The idea is reflected in the Smiling Curve, a concept widely used in business strategy. It suggests that manufacturing sits at the center of the curve, while higher-value activities tend to cluster at both ends - from R&D and product innovation to branding and customer relationships. In other words, competitive advantage is often built not on making products alone, but on understanding the market behind them.
It’s also where many Vietnamese businesses hit a wall when entering international markets. As Ms. Megan Nguyen, Head of Seller Growth & Success at Amazon Global Selling Vietnam points out, the real barrier isn’t manufacturing capability. “It’s the lack of visibility into the end consumers you’re trying to reach”. Until recently, closing that gap demanded years of market experience, considerable investment in capital and talent and dedicated teams. AI is beginning to change that.
How AI Helps Businesses Turn Market Signals Into Opportunities
AI doesn’t create more data. It changes how businesses interpret the data they already have. By surfacing patterns and connecting existing signals, AI enables companies to understand shifting market demand without relying solely on months of sales data or costly experimentation. Increasingly, AI is moving beyond analytics to support functions traditionally handled by market researchers, consumer insight teams, and brand strategists.
For Ms. Trang Tran, Senior Regional Marketing Manager at Amazon Ads, the real advantage of AI lies in how quickly it turns existing data into actionable insight. By helping businesses analyze information at greater speed and with a clearer understanding of customer needs, AI gives them a stronger foundation to identify opportunities, validate ideas, and shape their brands from the very beginning.
But AI isn’t just transforming how businesses understand the market. It’s changing how the market behaves. According to Ms. Trang Tran, consumers are increasingly turning to AI for recommendations instead of starting with a traditional keyword search. For businesses, that changes the nature of customer insight itself. The focus is shifting from what consumers purchase to what they ask, what they expect, and where unmet demand still exists. Those signals can guide product development, improving existing ones and building marketing strategies that reflect real customer needs.
Once businesses understand their customers, the question is no longer what to sell, but how to tell a story customers genuinely connect with. According to Ms. Trang Tran, that’s where AI is beginning to reshape brand building. AI-powered solutions such as Creative Agent on Amazon Creative Studio can now support work that once required an entire marketing team. Using product data and customer insights, the platform can generate creative concepts, visuals, videos and marketing copy tailored to different markets, allowing businesses to test multiple ideas across markets in a fraction of the time.
Drawing on years of experience advising Vietnamese sellers on Amazon, Mr. Henson Chu, Founder & CEO of Innovark Solutions has seen how AI is closing the gap between insight and execution. Rather than manually reviewing reports before making campaign adjustments, companies can now evaluate ad performance, optimize budget allocation and reach the right audiences in real time through tools such as Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP.
VinaCafe is one case in point. By using AI to manage more than 1,000 advertising campaigns on Amazon, the company cut advertising costs by 20% while growing revenue by more than 10%. More importantly, the results illustrate a broader shift: AI is no longer just helping businesses work faster, it is helping them make better decisions at scale.
The Game Changes When AI Starts Acting
AI can only create value when it’s powered by meaningful data. For businesses, that means investing not only in technology, but also in the data needed to understand the market. With billions of searches, purchases and customer reviews generated on its platform, Amazon has become a valuable source of market intelligence. According to Ms. Trang Tran, tools such as Product Opportunity Explorer analyze billions of shopping signals to uncover unmet demand and highlight opportunities with the greatest potential. Paired with generative AI, the entire process - from market research and content creation to idea validation - becomes significantly faster.
For Thyoi, that shift has brought the brand closer to the people who matter most: end consumers. “Today, we’re no longer simply manufacturing to customers' specifications”, says Ms. Nha Y. By listening directly to customer feedback, the company has become more deeply involved in product development, brand building and creating value of its own. She describes this transformation as a shift from Made in Vietnam to Created by Vietnam - one that is beginning to define the next generation of Vietnamese businesses.
AI is also moving beyond market intelligence and brand building into day-to-day business operations. According to Ms. Megan Nguyen, new capabilities on Amazon Seller Central enable businesses to proactively analyze sales performance, anticipate inventory and demand fluctuations, as well as generate recommended actions before issues escalate. Instead of having to make decisions based solely on experience, businesses now have a partner that can aggregate, analyze data, and suggest suitable solutions. The ability to make faster, data-driven decisions enables businesses to operate with greater agility, thereby enhancing their competitiveness and adaptability to the market.
A co-founder that never sleeps, never tires, and can process millions of data points every day is quietly finding its place inside businesses of all sizes. Its value lies not in replacing human judgment, but in helping business leaders see further, understand markets more deeply and act with greater speed. Perhaps, that’s why calling AI a “co-founder” no longer feels like a metaphor - it increasingly reflects the reality of how modern businesses are being built and run.