A company can have the best technology in the world. It can have the strongest talent. It can have the coolest product ideas. But to train the algorithms that will deliver the intelligence to transform our cities, it needs data. To wit: The company with the most data wins.

Jessi Hempel is Backchannel's editorial director. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

That’s why earlier this year, after leaving Microsoft the previous fall, legendary engineer Qi Lu headed to Beijing to become Baidu's chief operating officer. At his former job, he was, among other things, CEO Satya Nadella’s top deputy in helping to lead the company’s AI strategy. Clearly, he saw more opportunity across the Pacific: In China, 731 million people—nearly twice the entire population of the United States—are online. Says Lu: “China has the structural advantage.”

On July 26, while Lu was visiting Silicon Valley, we sat down for an exclusive interview. Lu offered up an eye-opening explanation of how Baidu stands to dominate AI in China. And most places in the world, Lu notes, have much more in common with the tiny homes of the Chinese than the sprawling North American McMansions. He believes that could be China’s biggest advantage in rolling out AI to global markets. Sure, America’s tech giants may have the lead in talent—for now—but Lu believes that Baidu has what it will take to conquer the world.

Jessi Hempel: In the time since you’ve arrived at Baidu, there’s been a reorganization. As COO, what’s your role at the company?

I work very, very closely with Robin [Li, Baidu CEO]. We make sure he and I are fully in sync. I run R&D, sales, and marketing, because I want to make sure that our overall strategy is fully, fully in sync. That’s number one. Number two, I feel that we’re now much more clear and focused, in terms of strategy. It’s really two battles. One is strengthening our mobile foundations. The other is leading the AI era.

How do you describe your AI strategy?

We believe the best way to commercialize AI technology is to build ecosystems. Essentially, to enable our partners to better accelerate their pace of innovation, using healthy, stable economic models to build strong, long-term win-wins for our developers and partners. The baseline is Baidu Brain [the term Baidu uses for all of its AI assets]. It’s broader and more extensive than what Microsoft and Google offer today in the United States, because it’s a platform. We have 60 different types of AI services in our suite we call Baidu Brain.

And we’re the first major company to clearly separate the perceptual and the cognitive layer. Perceptive capability and the cognitive are related, but they are quite different. Most of the [other] AI platforms bundle them together.

What is Baidu’s equivalent of Siri or Cortana?

We are focusing on two platforms to bring our customers and partners together. The first platform we call DuerOS. DuerOS is a natural language-based, conversation-based, human computing platform. Very much like Alexa, Google Now, Siri, or Cortana in the United States. The only difference is DuerOS is so far ahead of anybody else. DuerOS in China has accumulated more conversation-based skill sets than anybody else. We have 10 major domains [and] over 100 sub-domains of conversational skills that we developed. We’re also building up an emerging partner ecosystem. So our partners are building more and more skill sets. Amazon, perhaps, has more than Baidu right now, because they have a larger partner ecosystem in the United States. But compared to most companies, in China, we’re clearly leading.

Number two, we are also clear leaders in partners. DuerOS today is in over 100 brands of private home appliances, whether it’s refrigerators, air conditioners, TVs, storytelling machines, or speakers.

How does the US market for voice technology compare to the Chinese market?

The home environment is very different. Because we’re talking about voice interactions. The acoustic environment, the pattern of noises, will be very different. Alexa, Echo, and Cortana are optimized for American homes. In my view, this only works in North America and maybe a portion of Europe. Essentially, the assumption is that you have spacious homes; you have several rooms. In China, that’s not the case at all. For our target, even for the young generation with high incomes, typically they have 60 square meters [645 square feet], sometimes 90 square meters [970 square feet].