China is increasingly becoming a test bed for global companies because developments move faster in the Chinese market than in other markets, Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and executive chairman of S4 Capital, said during a media interview at the 38th meeting of the International Business Leaders' Advisory Council for the Mayor of Shanghai on Oct 11.

He said numerous companies now view China as a laboratory for innovations they expect to see elsewhere, particularly in technology fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and blockchain.

"A lot of our clients will say they have to be more agile, more responsive, more flexible in China than any other market," Sorrell said.

Comparing China's GDP of about $20 trillion to a global total of about $120 trillion, Sorrell argued that China should account for roughly 15 to 20 percent of multinational companies' sales or investment.

Sorrell cited Unilever, Reckitt, and PepsiCo as examples of multinational companies that, in his view, have room to expand their operations in China.

Overseas expansion has become increasingly important for Chinese companies, Sorrell said, citing what he called the "Huawei strategy" of developing businesses in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region.

"The big commercial battleground, I would say, is Europe," Sorrell added.

Sorrell said China's exports had continued to strengthen despite the tariffs imposed by the United States, a trend he described as remarkable.

On artificial intelligence, Sorrell described three principal impacts on advertising, namely faster and cheaper commercial production, personalization at scale, and algorithmic media planning and buying.

He said China's large language models are open and less expensive than Western models.

Sorrell described the democratization of knowledge as one of AI's most powerful effects, saying the technology could flatten organizations and make information available at zero marginal cost.

He urged Chinese companies to treat marketing as an investment rather than a cost as they move into higher-priced market segments, citing BYD's premium launches in Europe.

Sorrell said that companies expanding internationally needed local knowledge to understand markets in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, even if technology allowed some work to be centralized.