Adam Maguire Wilson
A Western technologist in Hangzhou, making sense of Chinese AI and robotics for the rest of the world — and the other way round.
- 10 years
- Architecting and leading high-scale systems and the teams behind them
- 100+ projects
- Delivered across manufacturing, retail, finance, hospitality and more
- 2 governments
- Advised UK Ministers on the future of Smart Cities, and the Government of Barbados on coral restoration and reef health
I first came to Hangzhou in 2016, and it took me seven years to find my way back. In the time I was away, it became the sort of city where the labs behind DeepSeek, Qwen, Unitree and Deep Robotics are all a short ride from my apartment. Most people follow Chinese technology from the other side of the world; I get to watch it up close — near enough to see what's really going on, foreign enough to be honest about it.
Before Hangzhou, I spent a decade in Western technology — architecting high-scale systems, leading the teams that built them, and staying close enough to the engineering to know when a plan wouldn't survive contact with reality. The work ran across manufacturing, retail, finance, hospitality and insurance, and at one point as far as advising UK Government ministers on the future of smart cities. None of it was about AI, and all of it turned out to be useful preparation for it.
The work splits two ways. From the West: whether DeepSeek is safe to use, whether to build on Qwen, whether the robots are as far along as the videos suggest. From China: a Western read on the wider market — where their tools fit beyond home, and what 'going global' actually asks of them. Same vantage, pointed in two directions.
Away from all that, I'm a photographer and a PADI Divemaster — which explains the galleries and the dive log scattered through this site. I spent a year in Barbados leading dives and strapping coral fragments to restoration frames; these days it's the part of my life with no screens in it, which is probably why it works.