Seel: AI's Greatest Value Gap Lies in User Retention | A Micro-Interview on the AI Competitiveness of Global New Brands

【Ebrun Original】AI is penetrating every aspect of globalization at an unprecedented pace. From content generation and advertising placement to product R&D, customer service, supply chain, after-sales, and organizational collaboration, more and more companies are rethinking: will AI become a new watershed for brand competitiveness, or just another wave of homogenized competition driven by technology?

Different players have offered different answers in the face of this new variable brought by AI.

As an AI-powered after-sales service provider, Seel has long served the after-sales scenarios of brand-owned independent websites, helping businesses handle logistics, returns, warranties, and other after-sales processes, and is committed to transforming traditional after-sales costs into drivers for brand growth.

Currently, Seel has served over 5,000 global brands, including Anker Innovations, Creality 3D, and ZIYOUHOME, providing after-sales protection to more than 30 million consumers in Europe and North America.

Positioned in the after-sales link between brands and consumers, Seel sees the value of AI more reflected in user retention, trust-building, and long-term operational capabilities for enterprises. Based on these practices and observations, Chen Yalu, Global VP and General Manager of the Asia-Pacific region at Seel, shared their thoughts on how AI is reshaping global competitiveness.

Ebrun: In the direction of AI empowering brand globalization, which application area are you most optimistic about and consider the most valuable?

Seel: My answer might be different from most people's.

In recent years, the industry has almost entirely focused its attention on AI's application in the front-end—advertising, product selection, content generation—because that's where 'growth' seems closest. But I increasingly believe that AI's greatest value gap actually lies in the latter half of the customer journey, which is most easily overlooked: what happens after a user makes a purchase.

Whether a brand can truly establish itself overseas depends not on how many new customers it acquires, but on repurchase and trust, and both of these almost always happen in the after-sales phase. After-sales is precisely the area that has been most reliant on manual labor, hardest to standardize, and least seriously managed in the past—this is exactly where AI can create structural value: it can transform passive responses that relied on manpower and time differences into a 7×24, second-level, self-resolving capability, turning after-sales from a cost into an active touchpoint for managing user relationships.

So what I'm optimistic about is not 'AI helping you sell one more order,' but 'AI helping you turn every after-sales interaction into the starting point for the next repurchase.' Front-end AI determines your customer acquisition efficiency, while back-end AI determines your retention ceiling, and that ceiling is the brand's true moat.

Ebrun: Some say that AI has leveled the playing field for cross-border e-commerce operations, narrowing the gap between merchants. Do you think this is technological empowerment or a disguised form of cutthroat competition?

Seel: I'd rather say it's empowerment, but it has raised the overall competitive baseline.

AI indeed allows a small team today to possess capabilities that only large companies could afford in the past. A set of AI digital employees can handle multilingual customer service and conduct comprehensive online reputation analysis on the same day. The barrier to entry has been flattened; this is tangible empowerment.

However, it's important to see clearly: when everyone can achieve a 60/100 score using tools, 60/100 shifts from being an advantage to being an entry ticket. Leveling the field eliminates the 'capability gap' but amplifies the 'cognitive gap'—with the same AI tools, some use them to reduce costs, while others use them to reconstruct their relationship with users. So it's not cutthroat competition; it's shifting the competition from 'who has more resources' to 'who thinks more clearly.' For those with genuine brand ambitions, this is actually a good thing.

Ebrun: Various tech consumer goods going global are adding 'AI' wings. How can they avoid falling into 'technological self-indulgence' and not doing AI just for the sake of AI?

Seel: In a word: let AI grow from business pain points, not from PowerPoint slides.

Our own approach is to reverse-engineer the process. We don't first ask 'what can AI do?'; we first ask 'which link is most manpower-intensive, most uncertain, and most impacts the experience?' Find that real pain point, then let AI solve it. The effect will naturally be reflected in hard numbers like resolution rates, response times, and processing costs—it can't be faked, and it will be used sustainably.

There's also a simple criterion for judging whether it's 'self-indulgence': if this AI feature were to be taken offline tomorrow, would merchants feel the loss? If they would, it means it truly created value; if no one notices, then it might have been self-indulgence from the start.

AI is never the goal; it's a means to do something better, faster, and more cost-effectively—once this order is reversed, it's easy to slide into 'AI for AI's sake.'

Ebrun: Do you think that within the next three to five years, any industry in the outbound/global e-commerce field will be completely replaced or made obsolete by AI?

Seel: Rather than saying 'who will be replaced,' I'd prefer to change the perspective: where will value shift?

Some highly repetitive, standardizable tasks, such as first-level repetitive responses, basic translation and localization, and primary data organization, will gradually be absorbed by AI as foundational capabilities. But this doesn't mean people are being eliminated; it means people are being freed up for positions that require more judgment, creativity, and long-term relationship management. Everyone's value is migrating to a higher level.

After-sales is a great example: the repetitive parts are handed over to AI, freeing up people to do the real work of building user trust. And this is precisely the part that AI cannot replace and is most effective at differentiating brands. So I'm not too worried about 'disappearance'; I'm more looking forward to the 'relocation' of effort to more valuable areas.

Ebrun: In the AI era, will the valuation models for new global brands change? How?

Seel: They will change, and it's already happening. The core shift is from 'looking at scale' to 'looking at retention quality and certainty.'

In the past, people were used to using scale metrics like GMV and growth rate to value an overseas brand. But in the AI era, the barrier to acquiring scale is decreasing; scale itself is no longer the only answer. Capital will place more emphasis on several new variables: first, the real LTV/CAC ratio—whether users are retained or leave after one purchase; second, repurchase and trust assets, meaning whether the brand has built sustainable user relationships; third, whether AI has been turned into a structural efficiency advantage, not a one-time investment.

To put it more bluntly: future valuation will no longer just be about 'how much traffic you can attract,' but 'after the traffic comes in, can you retain them at a low cost and make them willing to come back?' And user trust and repurchase are precisely the most undervalued and imaginative parts of this retention chain.

About the 10th Global Cross-Border E-commerce Summit and Global New Brand AI Competitiveness Conference

As a significant industry event in the field of cross-border e-commerce and brand globalization, the 10th Global Cross-Border E-commerce Summit and Global New Brand AI Competitiveness Conference will be held in Hangzhou on July 23.

With the theme of 'Racing Ahead with Tech Aesthetics,' this conference will focus on brand global competitiveness in the AI era, discussing topics such as R&D-driven brands, AI Agents, product innovation, brand organizational transformation, and the globalization ecosystem. It will bring together brand companies, platforms, service providers, investment institutions, and industry experts to jointly explore how AI is reshaping global growth.

This article is one in a series of micro-interviews for the conference. Before the conference, Ebrun will continue to release more frontline perspectives from brands, platforms, service providers, and industry partners, exploring the new propositions of globalization in the AI era together with the industry.