By SGN | 23 Oct 2026
For many, a 22-year career in marketing might inspire a sense of settling into a comfortable rhythm. But for Liru Chan, comfort is simply a sign that you aren’t quite done growing.
In late 2024, before the AI boom, she stood at a crossroads in her career. In one hand was a prestigious, predictable offer from a prominent Singaporean bank. In the other was from a global cloud computing giant with Chinese origins at the cusp of what could be an exponential AI boom.
Choosing the path of growth and friction, Liru declined the banking track to leap directly into the unknown.
“My gut was telling me to go for the AI opportunity,” she recalls. “I’d be uncomfortable, as I’d have to conduct most of my business in Mandarin, but I wanted to see where this path would take me.”
Today, as an international marketing leader at Alibaba Cloud, Liru’s mandate is twofold: architecting global acquisition funnels for AI-native startups while transforming her internal teams to be entirely AI-first.
It is a role that demands a rare professional trait: the ability to thrive in high levels of ambiguity.
Learning to expect the unexpected
Liru’s capacity to anchor global tech teams through unpredictable market cycles was forged years earlier when she moved to China to experience a large market where the next billion customers would come from ” and had the chance to lead a challenging business situation for Edelman in Shanghai.
Arriving without professional fluency in Mandarin, she was met with immediate cultural and operational friction.
“In China, business is deeply relationship-oriented,” she notes, contrasting it with Singapore’s highly structured, task-focused environment.
“I received a lot of initial pushback from my team, who felt I was too mission-oriented and didn’t take time to understand how people were feeling. As Singaporeans, we tend to focus strictly on the task at hand, but in China, every business outcome must also align with broader government policy and stance.”
Beyond the cultural shift, managing massive regional accounts exposed her to a scale of unpredictability impossible to replicate at home. She recalls spending a year planning a high-profile Xbox launch involving a takeover of Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower, only for a sudden typhoon to cancel the event on the day itself, leaving fans in tears.
Re-starting from scratch amidst the retail grind
On other accounts, crisis management was a weekly routine that ranged from tackling standard hygiene scares to handling armed miscreants entering stores to create trouble.
“Because I was able to survive so much uncertainty, I left China with an unshakeable confidence in my ability to handle whatever comes next,” Liru shares.
“While Singapore is a great place to live, its stability makes for a more predictable life. Dealing with extremes builds your internal response system. It makes you incredibly resilient to go, 'Okay, that just happened. Let’s move on. What’s next?"
Navigating the breakneck velocity of the AI frontier
This resilience helped Liru navigate the relentless speed of Chinese tech titan Alibaba during the generative AI boom.
As an international marketing leader at Alibaba Cloud, she describes her mission as “architecting growth for the AI era.” Her mandate is twofold: developing the international value proposition for Qwen and building scalable digital acquisition funnels to reach AI-native startups globally, while leading her teams towards a AI-first way of working.
“In many Western tech companies, the strategy process is highly deliberative,” she observes.
“Teams debate, iterate, and polish a plan for months. Chinese tech companies accelerate these timelines to breakneck speeds. Once leadership decides on a direction, working teams fall into line immediately, and a minimum viable product is ready to launch in no time.
To keep pace, Liru intentionally flattened her management approach. Rather than relying on rigid, top-down processes, she built a culture of trust and high autonomy that empowered her team to challenge legacy workflows, experiment freely, and engineer their own solutions to overcome operational bottlenecks.
Today, her department deploys custom-built AI paid media agents to optimise strategies, 24/7 web crawlers to instantly source sales leads, and an automated webmaster that generates conversion-optimised sites in split seconds.
Fostering this environment requires leaders to willingly learn from their subordinates. When Liru recently compiled a standard fiscal recap in a Word document, her tech-savvy team instantly transformed it into a stunning, interactive webpage.
“Working in a Chinese AI company right now is a privilege,” she says. “I try to approach every situation with curiosity, so I can learn from people more experienced than myself.”
Telling compelling stories under pressure
“My time in PR provided me with an incredible foundation, because I put myself in situations where I had to learn about multiple industries on the fly, and adopt the perspectives of senior executives,” she shares. “This lent me great insights into how they think and operate.”
Her transition from a traditional public relations background to a highly technical, data-driven cloud marketing executive wasn’t without its detractors. Early on, critics dismissed her as “just a PR girl” who couldn’t grasp paid media or analytical metrics.
“I was determined to prove them wrong,” she says.
By holding onto her core strength of storytelling, and matching it with upskilling on rigorous data analytics, she went on to manage cross-border expansions across more than 100 markets at PayPal, untangling complex cultural barriers like pre-pandemic Japan’s deep-seated resistance to digital payments.
The balance of strategic data and human-centric narrative came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she spearheaded Visa’s “Where You Shop Matters” campaign in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board (STB). With borders closed, the campaign shifted entirely inward to support struggling local micro-businesses.
“As marketers, we always ask ourselves about business value, but also people value —what does our work bring to society?” she reflects.
The impact of this campaign turned out to be intensely personal.
Deana, a local prawn noodle vendor featured in the campaign’s cinema ads, saw an unprecedented surge not just in immediate sales, but in secure, long-term business partnerships. “The appreciation they displayed was on another level. It reminded me why storytelling actually matters to people’s lives.”
The power of being present
“High performers are used to pushing through pain,” she notes. “But my body was constantly signaling that it had enough. I was emotionally dysregulated, breaking down over the smallest triggers, and completely incapable of switching off—even on holiday.”
Initially, she brushed her physical symptoms off as ‘old age’, and chided herself for being ‘weak’. Seeking professional help through therapy and executive coaching helped her recognise these signals for what they truly were.
“For a long time, I let work dictate my limits,” she reflects. “It was only through coaching that I truly did the deep work to define my personal values. Once I was clear on what actually mattered to me, setting firm boundaries stopped feeling like a weakness, and started feeling more like essential self-leadership.”
After completing 100 hours of peer coaching to earn her own certification, she now actively uses mindfulness to anchor both herself and clients.
“Thinking about the past brings depression, while fixating on the future brings anxiety,” she reasons.
“At some point, you need to stop living in either projection and be present with your current circumstances. The present moment is the only place you can make positive changes, even if you make mistakes. How empowering is that?”
For young Singaporean executives navigating an increasingly unpredictable global landscape, Liru offers simple, but enduring wisdom: welcome the friction.
Her core personal mantra? “Anything is Possible. Visualise it, verbalise it, and do the work.”
“Put yourself out there and don’t let your negative internal self-talk slow you down,” she shares. “Moving forward, and making mistakes is much better than remaining stagnant.
She also warns younger people to not be swept up with appearances. “People are most likely hiding their personal pains behind glossy social media feeds,” she says.
“Success does involve a good amount of growth and pain, so don’t be afraid to embrace it, because it will set you apart in the future."
About Liru
Liru Chan has over 20 years of experience leading marketing transformations for US and Chinese giants like Alibaba Cloud, Google, PayPal, Visa, and Edelman.
Connect with her here.
