Guest: Casey Lau, EVP at Web Summit and Co-founder of Startups HK

Casey Lau has spent close to 30 years in Hong Kong building community at the intersection of startups, tech, and global innovation. As EVP at Web Summit — which runs flagship events in Lisbon, Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, and Doha — he has a rare vantage point on tech ecosystems around the world. He is also co-founder of Startups HK, a pillar of the startup community in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area.

In this episode Casey joins Renee and Chris fresh from a month-long tech tour across five Chinese cities — Shenzhen, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai — his first time back on the mainland since before the pandemic.

What we cover:

Casey's global view from Web Summit — why the only race that really matters right now is US versus China, and why Europe is watching from the sidelines

What shocked Casey most about returning to China in 2026 — from frictionless payments to the sheer pace of change on the ground

Inside the Geely/Zeekr factory — a dark factory the size of a city block with 1,000 people doing last-mile work while robots assemble cars that were ordered online just days earlier

China's generative video AI scene — why MiniMax, Seedance, Kling, and Alibaba's Happy Horse are the models people aren't talking about enough in the West

Pop Mart Land in Beijing — why Casey thinks Labubu has barely scratched the surface globally, and what a full-scale Pop Mart theme park looks like in practice

The F&B wave coming West — Heytea, Mixue, Luckin, and why Luckin buying Blue Bottle could spell real trouble for Starbucks

Why China is forward-looking and the West is backward-looking — and what that means for the pace of innovation and adoption

Chinamaxxing — why everyone at Web Summit Lisbon wanted to talk about China, and what the cultural shift toward Chinese brands, food, and culture means for global commerce

The one through line across every category Casey visited: speed of iteration that no one else in the world can match

Dr. Sumit Mitra is CEO of Tesco Business Solutions and Tesco India, overseeing a team that spans payroll and finance to AI, property, supply chain, and customer contact — serving 90 million shopping trips a week.

In this episode he gives us an inside look at how Tesco is applying AI across the business, what's actually delivering results, and what India's retail revolution is signalling for the rest of the world.

We cover:

• What Tesco Business Solutions actually does — and why the CEO calls it Tesco's key competitive differentiator
• How Tesco structures AI into three buckets and why prioritisation matters more than technology
• The 50K / 60-day rule: how they cut failing projects before ego gets in the way
• Real AI use cases delivering triple-digit million returns in cash flow and personalisation
• Why AI for operations means reimagining the whole process, not automating a step
• India's leap from kirana stores straight to quick commerce — and what's driving it
• Whoosh, Tesco's 30-minute delivery service, already a £400M business
• Omnisol: how Tesco is now taking its proprietary AI tools to market for other retailers

Guest: Dr. Sumit Mitra, CEO, Tesco Business Solutions & Tesco India Hosts: Renee Hartmann & Chris Baker