The takeaways
Opportunities in media coverage gaps remain beyond the U.S.–China lens—especially in China’s relationship with the Global South
Companies are moving more cautiously on the Chinese market, factoring in geopolitical and supply chain risk
Organizations must adapt to AI-driven disruption and technological shifts, not just focus on revenue streams
Welcome to the latest edition of Nüora Global’s newsletter. I’m Solarina Ho, Editor of Research and Publications at Nüora, and a journalist and former Reuters correspondent with more than two decades of reporting experience across business, health, science, and more.
Growing up on firsthand family accounts of postwar China, the Cultural Revolution, and the country’s transformation into a global superpower, understanding China through a nuanced lens has been an indelible part of my life. Amid the volume of coverage and noise, I hope that lens can serve as a compass in this newsletter, as Nüora’s contributors distill complex issues and draw from multilingual sources to support your organizational and business needs.
Between the AI revolution and global tensions upending norms, the future feels more unpredictable than ever. Newsrooms are grappling with how to use (or not use) AI at a time when media trust in the U.S. has plunged to an all-time low.
Meanwhile, AI tools make manufacturing disinformation easier than ever. And all this comes amid rising geopolitical tensions, with more than a dozen countries pulled into the war in Iran so far. And let’s not forget the U.S. strike against Venezuela in early January.
Our managing partner, Joanna Chiu, spoke with Gina Chua, executive editor-at-large at Semafor, in Kuala Lumpur at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC)—the world’s largest gathering of investigative reporters. Their conversation explored how journalism is adapting in the age of AI, and how businesses are approaching China amid growing uncertainty.
Gina Chua. Credit: Reuters
Gina is a former executive editor at Reuters, where she oversaw editorial operations, including safety and security, and helped build its data journalism team. She previously served as editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and spent 16 years at The Wall Street Journal, including as deputy managing editor in New York and editor of its Asia edition.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What do you think journalists and news organizations should think about and prioritize when it comes to not missing current opportunities to generate revenue?
Gina: So, it’s less about revenue and much more about what the moment is. I think we are on the edge of—or have passed the edge of—a technological revolution in how information is processed.
To be clear, I’m not saying this is a good thing—I’m just saying this is a thing. Generative AI is going to change how people come to information. It’s already changing how people are consuming information. We don’t have to like it. There are a lot of problems here. But we have to recognize that this is a moment, and we have to find ways to play in this space effectively if we want to fulfill our mission.
We were talking about Nüora’s mission to try to have more nuance in the China consulting space. As a former editor at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, where do you see the current appetite for China-related news? And where do you see opportunities for journalists, in a crowded space, to still cover something fresh?
Gina: Of course it’s a crowded space—because it’s a huge story. I don’t have specific advice about what people should and shouldn’t cover. I will say there are huge opportunities for people who want to understand the U.S.-China relationship. But I think there are also huge opportunities for people who want to understand the “China and the rest of the world” relationship: China and Southeast Asia, China and Japan, for example. China and Africa, China and Latin America.
China’s a rising power one way or another. And leaving aside current U.S. policy, trying to understand China as a country, as a place, as a power that has its own interests and its own legitimate concerns about the world—and covering it from that point of view—I think is a real service. It helps people understand why China makes the decisions it does, exactly the same way we would cover why the U.S. does what it does.
You’ve been a business journalist for most of your career. Looking back, what’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in how Western companies approach the China market? Are we now seeing a more realistic view of Chinese consumers and on-the-ground realities?
Gina: I think there was a huge rush early on—25, maybe 30 years ago—where the original idea was, “If only we could sell one tube of toothpaste to every Chinese person, we’d be rich.” I think there’s been a real realization that that was a pipe dream all along.
That morphed into understanding China as a manufacturing center, then that morphed into understanding China as a market—but not an infinite market. And I think the moment has shifted one more time, just again, with U.S.-China relations.
People are now thinking about geostrategic risk and how much they want to put their supply chain out in the world, and what geopolitical shifts might mean for their companies. And so I think we just see a great deal more hesitancy about diving in, and more patience to look at how the world slowly shakes out over the next year or two.
Credit: Unsplash
When your new boss at work may not be human
Speaking of the AI revolution, while much of the conversation has focused on the displacement of entry-level jobs, a shift is happening higher up the ladder. In a recent piece for Al Jazeera, Joanna explores how AI agents—systems designed to plan, reason, and carry out multistep tasks—are moving into the territory of middle and senior management. Below is an adapted excerpt:
Qaiser Habib, the Toronto-based head of Canada engineering at Snowflake, an American cloud-based data platform, spends 20 to 30 hours a week interacting with five AI agents. Snowflake has built agents to review product design or to help on-call engineers to help during an outage or an incident, among other uses. Habib estimates the average engineer works with three or four agents daily, using them to carry out coding projects under human supervision.
“You don’t have to bother a human for basic questions any more,” Habib said, noting that he still collaborates with colleagues on more complex work, such as troubleshooting coding problems.
As companies experiment with AI agents the technology is beginning to reshape office hierarchies across the United States and Canada. Unlike chatbots, which respond to prompts, AI agents can adapt to changing contexts such as business goals and draw on reference tools including calendars, meeting transcripts and internal databases, to complete work with limited human oversight.
In some workplaces, AI systems are not just completing tasks but also assigning them to human workers. As the technology improves, AI agents are also beginning to manage each other.
These agent-to-agent workflows can help companies scale faster. But they also intensify concerns that AI is moving beyond assistance into supervision – and potentially, job replacement.
Read the full story here.
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We’re also pleased to welcome new additions to Nüora’s core advisory team.
John Gruetzner joins as Senior Advisor, overseeing project peer review and contributing to client risk assessment and corporate strategy. We also welcome Dr. Mercy Kuo as Principal Advisor on geopolitical risk, specializing in U.S.–China strategic competition.
You’ll be hearing more from both in future newsletters. Contact us to learn how we can assemble a consulting team tailored to your needs.
— Solarina Ho, Editor, Research and Publications at Nüora