This article is reprinted from the WeChat official account: Harvard Business Review Lab
Under the comprehensive penetration of AI, enterprises' digital-intelligent transformation has entered a deep phase involving synergistic innovation in data, business, organization, and management. Only by building intelligent pathways based on their own strengths can companies break through bottlenecks and establish long-term competitive advantages.
The special issue co-created by Harvard Business Review China and Feishu, titled "Coexisting with AI: Practical Answers to Redefining Enterprise Efficiency," adheres to the philosophy of leading concepts and practical focus. It establishes an analytical framework from cognitive renewal to practical implementation, selecting Bloomage BioTechnology's systematic AI-driven reinvention of biomanufacturing logic as a representative corporate case.
As the wave of AI sweeps across industries, the biomanufacturing sector is also being reshaped by this technological force. Unlike consumer goods industries driven by traffic competition, biomanufacturing is inherently characterized by long R&D cycles, extremely high technical barriers, strict compliance regulations, and lengthy industrial chains. For a long time, the entire industry has generally faced developmental bottlenecks such as low efficiency and high costs. Although traditional digitization has achieved basic process online and system informatization, it has consistently failed to break the entrenched困境 of fragmented data and disconnected operations, making it difficult to achieve genuine value accumulation and efficiency enhancement.
But in the eyes of Zhao Yan, Chairwoman of Bloomage BioTechnology, many breakthroughs that once seemed impossible have now "become possible." "The development speed of synthetic biology is no less impressive than that of AI. The convergence of AI and BT (biotechnology) opens up vast imaginative space for life sciences."
For this reason, Bloomage BioTechnology has established the deep integration of AI and business as the core strategy to propel the enterprise’s leap from a "manufacturing plant" to a "command center," clearly defining 2026 as the year of AI integration. More importantly, as a leading biomanufacturing company deeply rooted in life and health with the mission of "making every life vibrant," Bloomage BioTechnology consistently upholds a long-termism focused on "difficult but right" decisions. The company does not view AI merely as a simple office tool or point-level efficiency booster, but elevates it to an essential component of corporate strategy and management philosophy. It has built a systematic AI architecture characterized by strategic leadership, foundational support, full-chain penetration, and gradual progression toward ecosystem openness—relentlessly exploring the path from digital accumulation to intelligent transformation. Its exploration process and practical experience provide valuable reference directions for other R&D-intensive, long-chain biotech companies.
Strategic Leadership
"Long-Term + Pragmatic": Setting the Course for AI Transformation
The key to success in enterprise digital-intelligent transformation has never been about piling up technological tools, but rather whether there is clear strategic determination and a long-term vision.
Bloomage BioTechnology understands this well. As an industry leader in biomanufacturing, the company demonstrated sharp industry insight at the dawn of the digitization wave and was among the first in the sector to initiate digital transformation. Over a decade ago, Bloomage BioTechnology introduced an overseas ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system), taking a significant step in its digitization journey. However, as the company continued to expand and its business models became increasingly complex, the original systems came under growing pressure. Meanwhile, blueprint architecture and centralized management during system construction failed to keep pace with evolving business needs, gradually exposing deep-seated issues such as redundant development and process breakpoints—systems required constant patching to meet emerging business demands, maintenance costs soared, and inter-module connections became increasingly strained, ultimately forming insurmountable data silos.
This exploratory experience became a pivotal turning point in Bloomage BioTechnology’s digital transformation, directly driving two core shifts within the company.
First, prioritizing standardized construction and system building to solidify the foundational layer of digitization. Starting in 2019, Bloomage BioTechnology mandated that all new factory equipment must meet Industry 4.0 standards, abandoning the previous misconception of "emphasizing technology over fundamentals." The company has since deepened its foundational investments, focusing on standardized accumulation of business data. This decision became a key differentiator, enabling Bloomage BioTechnology to cover all core business scenarios across front, middle, and back offices by around 2024, achieving multiple breakthroughs and establishing a robust digital foundation that strongly supports subsequent deep AI applications.
Second, establishing a clear "long-term + pragmatic" transformation mindset. Since then, long-termism and pragmatism have permeated every stage of the company’s digital and intelligent transformation. This is especially evident in recent AI initiatives. For AI projects, Bloomage BioTechnology has set explicit evaluation criteria: every AI initiative must center on improving efficiency, optimizing costs, enhancing quality, and ensuring risk control, guaranteeing that every investment translates into tangible business value and making AI a true enabler and driver of business development.
At the same time, Bloomage BioTechnology has established a clearly layered, progressive four-tier AI development system—not rushing for immediate results, but advancing steadily according to the rhythm of "building foundations, applying solutions, extending ecosystems." At the foundational level, using the Feishu ecosystem as a unified collaboration entry point, combined with enterprise data mid-end and proprietary knowledge base construction, the company completes underlying setup for full-staff collaboration, business data accumulation, and industry knowledge consolidation, thoroughly breaking down previous data silos. At the application level, on one hand, AI tools are universally promoted; leveraging Feishu’s low-code ecosystem, every employee can use intelligent tools tailored to their job needs to enhance work efficiency, enabling personal capability and enterprise growth to advance together. On the other hand, in specialized domains such as R&D, production, and quality, the company builds an enterprise-level AI platform to develop customized AI models suited to the characteristics of biomanufacturing, precisely addressing industry pain points and boosting core business performance. At the ecosystem level, building on its industrial strengths, the company gradually opens its pilot-scale platforms and participates in co-developing industry standards, radiating its internally accumulated AI capabilities outward to empower the entire biomanufacturing supply chain.
It must be emphasized that the strategic foresight and active involvement of top leadership are the cornerstone of Bloomage BioTechnology’s successful AI transformation.
As the company’s leader, Zhao Yan possesses exceptional sensitivity to cutting-edge technologies and acts decisively, firmly believing that "action speaks louder than anything." A typical example: as early as 2021, when Feishu had not yet become a mainstream collaborative tool, she敏锐ly recognized its core advantage—unlike other tools’ passive "people seeking tasks" model, Feishu enables "tasks finding people," effectively preventing missed work and enhancing cross-departmental collaboration efficiency. The following year, Bloomage BioTechnology fully migrated to Feishu, becoming one of the earliest large-scale domestic adopters of the platform. In today’s intelligent upgrade, Zhao Yan continues to emphasize: "AI is not some distant dream, but everyday essentials woven into the fabric of business operations." Within Bloomage BioTechnology, AI transformation is positioned as a top-down systemic project. Zhao Yan not only personally leads overall planning, spearheads AI strategy formulation, and coordinates cross-departmental resources, but also pioneers integrating AI agents into daily work and strategic decision-making. For instance, to address the issue of excessive meetings, she configured her AI agent to summarize 10 key strategic meeting contents and extract three unresolved common problems daily—enabling her to grasp core company dynamics in just 10 minutes each day, setting a vivid example for employees to embrace AI.
Deepening Application Scenarios
Breaking Ice from Collaboration, Penetrating Full-Chain Business
Continuing with the "long-term + pragmatic" transformation orientation, Bloomage BioTechnology did not blindly pursue grand, all-encompassing architectures in AI implementation. Instead, adopting a pragmatic approach focused on small entry points with high value, the company began by tackling high-frequency, pressing scenarios, establishing staff-wide awareness through perceptible efficiency gains, then progressively penetrating deeper into core business areas, ultimately achieving full-chain value restructuring.
Sales reporting and customer service became the initial breakthrough points for AI adoption at Bloomage BioTechnology. Following the deployment principle that "AI is part of organizational capability, scenarios stem from business pain points, and are created by those who best understand the business," the medical device business support team leveraged Feishu aPaaS (a code development platform enabling custom business tools based on Feishu and integration with various systems) to independently build the "Medical Device AI Employee Empowerment Assistant," serving as a model practice for AI implementation. As the global leader in hyaluronic acid, Bloomage BioTechnology’s medical device division employs over 400 front- and middle-office staff dispersed nationwide. Under the traditional model, sales personnel spent significant time writing daily CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) reports, frontline managers spent hours extracting key points, and information distortion occurred during multi-layer reporting, leaving senior leaders unable to access ground-level realities. Additionally, the complex product line of over 30 SKUs (stock keeping units) and training materials exceeding 20TB led to new employee training cycles lasting up to six months, making knowledge replication extremely difficult.
The "Medical Device AI Employee Empowerment Assistant" precisely addressed these two major pain points and has been rolled out for daily use by over 300 employees across the company. Its core consists of two modules: The AI Daily Report Assistant supports voice input, allowing reports to be completed in 2–3 minutes. The AI automatically extracts key content including "today’s summary, tomorrow’s plan, market insights," compressing report length to 1/8 of the original, saving over 1,000 person-days annually, and increasing information penetration from N+1 to N+3, enabling senior leaders to directly access frontline real-time data. The AI Medical Device Trainer establishes a closed-loop of "question generation – assessment – scoring – remediation," transforming scattered training materials into a "digital coach" that shortens new employee training from six months to two months, standardizes business training nationwide, and has even gained recognition and adoption from downstream hospitals.
After validating value in high-frequency collaboration scenarios, Bloomage BioTechnology extended intelligent capabilities across core functions including R&D, production, quality, and marketing. R&D, as the company’s core competitiveness, became a key focus area. Traditional synthetic biology R&D involves long trial-and-error cycles. Bloomage BioTechnology built a 30-billion-molecule database and an AI-powered R&D platform, compressing processes such as strain construction, target screening, and fermentation parameter optimization—from timelines measured in years to days or even hours—significantly reducing trial-and-error costs and accelerating new product launches. Simultaneously, an intelligent literature retrieval system captures real-time results from top global life science journals, automatically interprets key findings, identifies patent gaps, and integrates with internal R&D knowledge bases and permission controls, enabling researchers to quickly access critical internal and external information without dedicated monitoring, greatly enhancing innovation efficiency.
In production, AI empowerment has enabled Bloomage BioTechnology to achieve true smart manufacturing. By deeply integrating MES (Manufacturing Execution System), DCS (Distributed Control System), and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) with AI, the company achieves real-time control of full-process parameters and intelligent risk warnings, shifting quality control from post-event correction to pre-event prevention. It has also developed intelligent satellite factories, condensing production processes that previously required 3,000 square meters of traditional factory space into refrigerator-sized integrated equipment.
To ensure precise AI scenario implementation, Bloomage BioTechnology established a full-process mechanism from screening to promotion: by identifying repetitive tasks across roles, collecting genuine frontline pain points, and hosting internal AI innovation contests, the company widely uncovers potential intelligent transformation opportunities, prioritizing automation of mechanical, repetitive operational tasks while gradually exploring business model reengineering—a prime example being content placement. By setting performance thresholds, Bloomage BioTechnology now uses AI to autonomously generate content, create accurate user profiles, match personalized needs, monitor ad placements, and verify cost and value, creating a complete closed loop from market demand to commercial realization.
Zhao Hong, General Manager of Bloomage BioTechnology’s Mega Operations and Digital Center, candidly admits that large-scale business model reengineering still requires time, but incremental AI applications are flourishing like a hundred flowers blooming. Bloomage BioTechnology views AI as a capability for all employees, not just the IT department, advocating that "everyone is a developer," significantly boosting innovation vitality at the business end. The company strongly encourages departments to explore AI applications independently, promoting the principle of "implement first, optimize later." Today, Feishu’s daily active rate exceeds 95%, with nearly 30% of employees regularly using various Feishu AI products. Meanwhile, to address potential technical challenges and sensitive data security issues in AI applications, the company is building an enterprise-level AI platform to specifically support sensitive AI projects involving R&D and financial data—releasing business innovation vitality while strengthening data security defenses, achieving a balanced synergy between innovation and safety.
Before any AI application goes live at Bloomage BioTechnology, it undergoes multidimensional evaluation—assessing technical suitability, efficiency improvement potential, scalability, and business contribution—to select projects with the highest practical value. After launch, a data transparency mechanism follows up: the company publicly displays usage volume and activity levels of each application in its internal "AI App Store" in real time, conducts monthly reviews of departmental application performance to verify alignment with business needs and practical value, thereby encouraging proactive participation in AI adoption and fostering a virtuous cycle of "rapid need fulfillment and agile application iteration."
Organizational Enablement
Leveraging Collaboration to Break Deep Barriers in Digital-Intelligent Implementation
If technology and scenarios form the skeleton of AI transformation, then organization, talent, and culture are the flesh and blood supporting its depth and sustainability. Bloomage BioTechnology deeply understands that the ultimate challenge of AI implementation lies not in the technology itself, but in adapting organizational change, reshaping talent systems, alleviating employee concerns, and achieving human-AI symbiosis.
Zhao Yan firmly believes: "AI will ultimately reshape the fundamental industrial logic of biomanufacturing—first reshaping business logic, and once business logic changes, organizational structures and human capabilities must follow suit."
Based on this understanding, Bloomage BioTechnology was among the first to break down rigid boundaries of traditional functional departments, systematically optimizing its organizational structure: integrating AI, information technology, and business analytics functions into a dedicated coordinating department responsible for AI strategy planning, data governance, and technical platform development, resolving internal inefficiencies in cross-departmental collaboration; restructuring business units by replacing departmental silos with data flows and task flows, aligning with the new AI-era business model of "demand-driven, data-led, and cross-domain collaboration." Today in Bloomage BioTechnology’s factories, traditional operators have upgraded to engineers, task-based collaboration supersedes departmental divisions, and even the former three major product marketing departments have merged, with core personnel now leading teams of AI agents.
"Only when people’s understanding and cognition are aligned can the company move forward," said Zhao Yan. "Faith in data, confidence in AI" has become a core requirement for all employees. To achieve this, Bloomage BioTechnology has established a comprehensive AI training system, delivering tiered cognitive training and hands-on exercises so managers understand the strategy and business staff master the tools. Leveraging the Feishu knowledge base, the company systematically transforms decades of tacit knowledge from R&D, production, and marketing into institutional assets that can be preserved and passed on, using AI-powered knowledge graphs for intelligent recommendations. Regarding employee concerns about job security, the company guides staff to shift from repetitive tasks to higher-value work such as innovation and judgment through internal role adjustments and open skill advancement pathways.
A matching incentive and promotion mechanism is equally essential. To stimulate full-staff engagement, Bloomage BioTechnology incorporates AI implementation outcomes into departmental performance evaluations, with clear metrics tied to business value—for example, AI effectiveness in sales is measured by revenue growth and opportunity conversion, not vague efficiency improvements. In regular internal AI innovation contests, outstanding proposals receive multiple incentives including honors, resource allocation, advanced token usage rights, and priority promotion.
Culture is the soul of transformation and the spiritual soil for AI to take root. Bloomage BioTechnology places great emphasis on continuously conveying the core idea that "AI empowers and fulfills people," clearly positioning AI agents as collaborative partners rather than replacements, carefully balancing technological efficiency with human warmth. For example, Zhao Yan requires every employee to have their own AI assistant this year, but stresses it doesn’t have to be used solely for work—"even for planning your vacation"—so employees feel the practical value of AI rather than pressure.
"Technology must first be good, then beautiful, then elevated—never lose warmth at any time, because ultimately AI must serve humanity," she said.
Based on years of digital-intelligent practice, Bloomage BioTechnology has distilled three concise, pragmatic, and directly applicable AI transformation experiences for the biomanufacturing industry:
Lead with strategy, with top leadership personally steering. AI transformation is an organizational-level deep change; only with high-level management drive can the entire workforce align cognitively, resources be coordinated, and transformation consensus be formed.
Start from real pain points, advance incrementally. There’s no need to pursue grand architectures all at once. Prioritize high-frequency, high-value, essential scenarios for pilot implementation, accumulate proven results, then gradually expand to mitigate transformation risks.
Break functional boundaries, unleash full-staff vitality. AI transformation is not exclusive to the tech department. Use positive mechanisms to encourage full participation and proactive exploration, making frontline business teams the main drivers of innovation, cultivating a continuous self-optimizing digital-intelligent culture.
Many current enterprise digital-intelligent transformations suffer from overemphasizing technology and neglecting organization, or focusing on concepts while ignoring execution. Bloomage BioTechnology’s strength lies in transcending the narrow mindset of mere tool upgrades: stabilizing direction through top-level strategy, realizing value through incremental implementation, activating innovation through full participation, and always preserving the essence of technology for good and people-centeredness. This transformation approach, balancing efficiency revolution with human warmth, offers invaluable practical references and differentiated solutions for the intelligent upgrading of complex industries like biomanufacturing.
Bloomage BioTechnology’s digital-intelligent exploration continues to yield results in a new round of AI practices. On July 29, 2026, the company’s second Feishu AI Pioneer Competition showcased a batch of innovative achievements from the business frontline. Participating projects covered pilot testing, quality, equipment maintenance, marketing content, VOC (Voice of Customer), brand sentiment, receivables risk control, business analytics, and travel reimbursement scenarios. Among them, the Pilot Testing AI Assistance System (pilot testing refers to small-scale production trials and process optimization conducted after laboratory R&D success but before full-scale mass production) integrates historical production records, equipment data, and industry knowledge to digitally preserve process expertise, expected to shorten pilot project cycles by 30%–50% and save approximately 5 million yuan annually in trial-and-error costs. The Brand Sentiment Response AI Agent establishes a collaborative system covering monitoring alerts, tiered analysis, material generation, and closed-loop resolution, reducing individual sentiment handling cycles from 7 days to 3 days. The Intelligent Maintenance Inspection System connects over 400 core devices and more than 3,000 sensors, enabling second-level anomaly detection and improving inspection coverage efficiency by 95%.
On-site at Bloomage BioTechnology’s Second Feishu AI Pioneer Competition
From frontline operations to management, AI is entering more specific processes within Bloomage BioTechnology. These tangible, verifiable outcomes confirm Zhao Yan’s judgment—that AI will ultimately reshape the fundamental industrial logic of biomanufacturing, starting with business logic. When AI is no longer just a few flagship projects, but continuously emerges from real business contexts, digital-intelligent transformation becomes an intrinsic, evolving organizational capability.
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