Sharon Gai

Sharon Gai is an international female keynote speaker for retailers, brands, and organizations. She uses her unique background in the East and West to work with leaders worldwide who are figuring out how to become disruptors in their industries. Gai is a culture-fluid expert in e-commerce, digital transformation, and AI.

She was born in northeastern China during a time when girls were told they are best if they are “serene and quiet." Immigrating to Canada at a young age, she was presented with a new language, culture, and way of viewing the world. Perhaps because of these geographical changes in her life, she became culture-fluid and cultivated a culturally intelligent way of looking at the world.

Today, she helps organizations see how leading companies use AI and innovative business models to disrupt their industry and exceed their competitors. In her tenure at Alibaba, she advised brands and heads of state in crafting their digital strategy with programmatic marketing and AI.

She has been the keynote speaker at TEDx, Singularity University, UBS, Deloitte, Nestle, Ecomworld, and Etail. She is a RETHINK Retail’s Top Retail Expert and a LinkedIn Top Voice in Public Speaking 2023. She has appeared on Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, CBC, CCTV, Techcrunch, Retail Asia, Wired, and The Next Web. She is also the author of the book "Ecommerce Reimagined: What We Can Learn in Retail and Ecommerce from China."

Gai has an Honors Bachelor’s degree in International Development from McGill and a Masters in Knowledge Management from Columbia University.