We need to institutionalize our past outstanding agile decision-making and market sensitivity through a digital system, building a self-evolving "organizational brain."
This article is reposted from the WeChat official account: Harvard Business Review Lab
Under pervasive AI penetration, enterprise digital transformation has entered a deep phase of innovation involving data, operations, organization, and management collaboration. Only by strategically leveraging their own resources can companies break through bottlenecks and build sustainable competitive advantages.
The special supplement Coexisting with AI: Practical Answers to Redefining Organizational Efficiency, jointly produced by Harvard Business Review China and Feishu, adopts a framework that prioritizes conceptual advancement followed by practical implementation. It establishes an analytical structure from cognitive renewal to real-world execution, selecting Proya’s pursuit of long-term growth through comprehensive digital intelligence as a representative case study.
The cosmetics industry today has long moved beyond the era of incremental expansion and has fully entered a cycle of competition within a saturated market. The core of market competition has shifted from traffic acquisition to a contest of integrated systemic capabilities, completely reshaping industry logic. Stable business operations and winning through systemic strength have become industry-wide consensus. For Proya, which has already surpassed the 10-billion-yuan revenue threshold, this challenge is particularly acute. Reaching 10 billion yuan in revenue marks a critical watershed in brand development—how to transcend scale limitations and escape the so-called "10-billion-yuan curse" has become the central issue for achieving continuous breakthroughs.
At this pivotal juncture of profound industry restructuring and intensified competition in a saturated market, Proya has also undergone a new upgrade in corporate governance and strategic thinking. In September 2024, Proya completed the transition of its core management roles, with young entrepreneur Hou Yaming officially assuming the role of General Manager, ushering in a new strategic development cycle for the brand.
In recent years, as numerous established enterprises enter maturity, a new generation of corporate leaders has gradually emerged. Compared to first-generation entrepreneurial teams, they generally possess broader global perspectives and more advanced cognition, exhibit high openness toward new technologies and trends, and are more adept at using systematic and intelligent thinking to overcome traditional growth bottlenecks.
Hou Yaming is a typical representative of this group. Standing at the intersection of a 10-billion-yuan revenue milestone and organizational evolution, he led the formulation of the "Double Ten Strategy"—a long-term goal of entering the top ten global cosmetics companies within the next decade.
To achieve this long-term vision, Proya has moved beyond the limitations of single-brand or single-category development, gradually establishing a new closed-loop growth model characterized by coordinated multi-brand positioning, precise targeting in niche segments, and synergistic interactions between channels and product categories. The company has clearly defined its core roadmap of "Four Modernizations, Dual Drivers" ("Four Modernizations": industrial platformization, collaborative ecologization, business globalization, and operational digitalization; "Dual Drivers": empowering industry through technological innovation and supporting management through talent aggregation). Scientific research builds core product barriers, globalization opens up long-term growth potential, and digitalization serves as the foundational connector and primary driving force linking the two and enabling comprehensive business operations.
"Digitalization is essentially the standardization and systematization of organizational capability. We aim to institutionalize those excellent practices of 'agile decision-making' and 'market intuition' from the past through a digital system, forming a self-evolving 'organizational brain,'" said Proya's management. "Going forward, we will continue leveraging digital capabilities to support global competition, maintaining agility, efficiency, and rapid responsiveness even in larger-scale and more complex environments. This represents the deeper capability logic behind our implementation of the Double Ten Strategy."
Breakthrough at One Point, Leading Transformation Across the Board
Deepening Foundational Capabilities in Enterprise Digital Intelligence
"Speed" is an inherent competitive trait in the cosmetics industry and has been central to Proya’s success. As it enters this new phase of 10-billion-yuan scale, Proya’s market sensitivity and rapid execution capabilities urgently need to be standardized, normalized, and replicable through a digital intelligence system.
To meet the demands of this new stage, Proya launched a comprehensive digital reform initiative in 2024 and appointed a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) in 2025, elevating AI and digital transformation to a company-level long-term strategy and positioning it as the core engine for sustained growth. By then, Proya had already established foundational information systems such as ERP and completed the digitization of basic operations. However, these systems were still limited to "recording" rather than "insight." The company now faces the critical transition from partial to holistic digitization and from mere data utilization to intelligent digitalization.
Proya understands that the biggest challenge in this transformation lies not in technology, but in deeply entrenched organizational cognitive inertia and departmental silos. Therefore, the company adopted a pragmatic strategy of small-entry-point breakthroughs leading to broad organizational transformation, choosing marketing—the area with the largest data volume, most complex scenarios, and highest business priority—as the reform pilot. Achieving low-cost, high-return results quickly helped consolidate organizational consensus.
In actual implementation, Proya employed a dual-driven mechanism combining "action" and "institution."
On the operational side, focusing on comprehensive marketing data governance, Proya unified data definitions across multiple brands and channels, integrated fragmented operational data, and built visualized dynamic business dashboards. Leveraging Feishu AI and knowledge bases, the company connected the entire marketing workflow—from content creation and campaign tracking to social media listening. A centralized marketing asset library was established, enabling AI to rapidly generate creative content, automatically track campaign performance, analyze user feedback, and dynamically optimize strategies based on data, effectively shortening the marketing cycle and reducing wasteful spending.
On the institutional side, Proya simultaneously issued the Digital and AI Basic Law, codifying data standards, collaboration rules, and evaluation mechanisms into formal policy to prevent isolated projects from becoming superficial or unsustainable.
The results were significant and visible. During major promotional events in 2025, Proya reduced its traditional seven-day manual review and decision cycle to just one day, enabling real-time adjustments at the individual product level. More importantly, the digital intelligence methodology proven in marketing evolved into a standardized system successfully replicated across R&D, production, supply chain, and organizational management, marking the company’s official entry into a new phase of enterprise-wide digital intelligence collaboration.
Scenario Expansion, End-to-End Integration
Enabling Full-Chain AI Empowerment
After validating the value of AI implementation in marketing, Proya continued its "marketing-led, enterprise-wide coverage" strategy, extending digital intelligence capabilities deeper into core areas such as R&D innovation and smart manufacturing, achieving intelligent upgrades across the entire industrial chain.
In today’s intensely competitive environment in the mature cosmetics market, robust scientific research constitutes the key barrier determining a brand’s long-term growth ceiling. Proya has built a triple-core R&D system based on its three R&D centers in Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Europe, integrating independent research, industry-academia-medical collaboration, and international coordination, with AI deeply embedded throughout the entire R&D process.
In cutting-edge research, Proya partnered with Borge Biotech, leveraging SAION AI—the world’s first Physical AI platform for bio-manufacturing—to enable intelligent screening, standardized experimentation, and precise validation of innovative biological ingredients. This transforms traditional experience-based R&D into a quantifiable, reproducible engineering model, significantly shortening the timeline from scientific discovery to mass production.
In daily R&D operations, Feishu AI handles repetitive tasks such as literature reviews, formula retrospectives, and data aggregation, improving research document processing efficiency by 50%, allowing scientists to focus on core technical challenges. Combined with tools like AI-powered formulators and patch test robots, the speed and accuracy of formula iteration and testing are greatly enhanced. Meanwhile, the Feishu system enables full traceability of experimental data and intelligent conversion of production process parameters, ensuring precise alignment between lab formulas and large-scale manufacturing, safeguarding both R&D outcomes and mass production.
Part of the process digitization platform built on Feishu
Production and supply chain represent Proya’s key domains for AI-driven cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and strengthening intelligent manufacturing foundations. Proya recognizes that only by reconstructing existing business processes with technology and solving current pain points can true commercial increment be unlocked. The lightweight intelligent upgrade of workshop management systems is a highly representative example.
Traditional production models heavily rely on manual records and experience, suffering from inefficient scheduling, inaccurate inventory, delayed response, and long training cycles for new employees. Using Feishu Multidimensional Tables and Feishu AI, Proya built a low-cost, lightweight intelligent workshop management system that reengineered information and decision flows in production.
The new system intelligently schedules production by integrating sales, inventory, and capacity data, improving scheduling efficiency by 1.5 times; full-process QR code traceability of materials, combined with AI-driven dynamic inventory monitoring and risk alerts, keeps material error rates below 0.5%; production anomalies can be reported with one click and assigned via AI, increasing problem response efficiency by 67%; additionally, all Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are documented in the Feishu knowledge base, enabling new hires to learn independently, halving the original six-month onboarding period. This truly achieves a lightweight reconstruction of traditional opaque production processes.
To avoid the drawbacks of high costs, long timelines, and high risks associated with in-house development, Proya adheres to an open, collaborative approach across its enterprise-wide AI deployment, prioritizing partnerships with specialized providers like Feishu and Borge Biotech for joint iteration. Today, Feishu has long transcended its role as a basic office tool, evolving into the core collaborative infrastructure supporting Proya’s digital transformation, enabling widespread AI adoption, cross-departmental efficient collaboration, and technological equity for all employees.
To prevent the re-emergence of data silos after integrating multiple technologies, Proya established a comprehensive safeguard system of "institution-first, unified architecture, closed-loop governance," ensuring all AI applications grow from a common foundation and maximize value: The Digital and AI Basic Law defines standardized management of data and systems; an enterprise-wide data mid-end creates a unified data foundation; and the "three horizontal, three vertical" data governance system ensures all data flows and is applied under uniform standards.
Organizational Renewal, Intelligent Coexistence
Building a Future-Oriented AI-Native Organization
The core competitiveness of digital transformation lies not in technology, but in organizational adaptability and talent capacity. Proya adheres to the principle of "technology and organization advancing in sync, tools and people coexisting," driving organizational upgrades, institutional innovation, and universal empowerment to dismantle departmental silos and cognitive inertia, allowing digital intelligence to truly become embedded in the company’s DNA.
At the organizational structure level, Proya upgraded its former Digital Committee to an AI Strategy Committee to oversee overall AI strategy planning, resource allocation, and scenario implementation. Simultaneously, cross-functional AI pioneer teams were formed to work directly with frontline operations, uncovering real pain points and iterating implementation scenarios, ensuring transformation remains grounded in business needs and avoids detachment. To address the challenges of fragmented legacy systems and heterogeneous data, Proya built a unified data mid-end and established regular cross-departmental data coordination meetings to standardize data definitions across the board, enabling R&D, marketing, supply chain, and finance to share a common data language, breaking down departmental walls and achieving data resonance.
On talent empowerment, Proya abandoned rigid enforcement methods, instead adopting flexible training programs to energize the organization. The company offers tiered AI night schools—aligning strategic understanding among managers and building shared transformation consensus—while delivering scenario-based practical training for frontline staff to lower AI usage barriers and convey the core message that "AI empowers and liberates people." Regular AI innovation contests encourage employees to explore lightweight AI applications based on their job-specific pain points, identifying internal AI champions and offering innovation incentives, transforming employees from passive executors into creators of digital value. This drives a qualitative shift from "project-driven AI" to "culture-driven AI" within the organization.
Currently, Proya’s digital intelligence transformation has completed foundational awakening and scenario piloting, officially entering the deep waters of building an AI-native organization. Going forward, the company will move beyond merely using tools for efficiency gains, gradually developing dedicated AI agents for each business line, creating an AI-native organization where "data flows like blood, intelligence spreads like nerves, and decisions react like reflexes." By deconstructing and institutionalizing the tacit expertise of top R&D and marketing professionals through data, SOPs, and large model training, Proya aims to build proprietary vertical AI assets that form an organizational capability barrier difficult for competitors to replicate. Through continuously evolving organizational intelligence, the company will sustainably deliver management premium and market advantage in executing its "Double Ten Strategy."
Proya’s AI-driven digital transformation represents a typical practice for cosmetics enterprises overcoming growth bottlenecks, and also reflects a broader trend of a new generation of corporate leaders upgrading and reshaping growth logic in the current era.
Over the past 30 years, first-generation entrepreneurs relied on courage and determination to lead their companies from nothing to something, from small to large, completing the initial phase of scale-based accumulation. Now, in this new era marked by intensified competition in saturated markets and disruptive changes brought by AI technology, the core mission of the new generation of leaders has evolved. Their goal is no longer simply to grow the company bigger, but to pursue long-termism, driving enterprises toward deeper, more stable, and higher-quality forms of sustainable advancement.
Compared to the previous era’s reliance on individual experience and chasing industry trends through extensive growth models, the new generation of leaders place greater respect on systemic value and data logic, viewing digitalization and AI integration as core infrastructure enabling companies to navigate industrial cycles and strengthen fundamental competitiveness.
In an uncertain market environment, they replace heroic individual decision-making with continuously evolving organizations, converting the company’s long-accumulated tacit operational experience into reusable, iteratable, and transferable digital assets. They substitute subjective personal intuition with professional, systematic organizational intelligence, achieving a fundamental transformation in business logic. This represents the new generation of corporate leaders proactively breaking through industrial disruptions and confidently answering the commercial challenges of the new era.