Dida co-founder James Jin on staying calm while AI moves faster than anyone can digest, and why the supply chain still wins.
James Jin, co-founder and CTO of Dida, one of Asia’s leading B2B travel technology companies, opened his Coffee Chat at WiT Japan with a confession, when asked about his relationship with AI, “Every day, especially at the beginning of this year, I feel excited and uncomfortable, even anxious. Constantly switching – one day it’s exciting, the next day I feel anxious.”
The source of that anxiety is the velocity of change. Jin has an agent that pushes him AI news every day. It is overwhelming him. “There are just too many things to test. Every week you have something revolutionary. Claude has already launched three or four models this year. It’s happening just too fast.”
For a CTO who has spent 14 years building one of the travel industry’s most technically sophisticated B2B platforms to make that confession – it was oddly reassuring.
Jin, who is “the quiet force” in Dida, rarely speaking at public forums, co-founded Dida in 2012, built initially on the gap between China’s still-analogue hotel distribution market and the API-driven world that already existed in Europe and the US.
Today, it has grown into a global B2B wholesale platform covering hotels, flights, and tours and activities. Jin spent four years at Expedia before founding Dida, working as an engineer and then a project manager. Thanks to the Expedia training, Dida’s culture is, by his own description, data-driven, pragmatic, and allergic to the kind of burn-rate aggression that consumed many of its Chinese competitors.
As to how he deals with the overwhelming pace of change, Jin said his instinct is to step back from the noise and ask the more durable question. “Instead of asking what has changed, we need to ask what has not changed.”
For Dida, the answer is clear. People still travel. When they travel, they need accurate content and real-time pricing. The supply chain – the connectivity, the rich content, the live inventory – remains the foundation.
“AI will have all the static data in the world, but it doesn’t know real-time prices, and it doesn’t have enough hotel content – reviews, dynamic amenities. Those are the abilities we need to build, and we need to be always AI-ready for that.”
In his opinion, the supply chain has a long way to go before it is AI-ready.
Which is why when asked what startup he would build today if starting from scratch, Jin did not hesitate: supply chain. “I’m sorry to say that, but in most hotels, the fact is, some are not even digital, let alone have data or AI. If you can develop that, it will be much easier for B2B players like us.”
As far as he is concerned, 14 years into building a platform that depends on hotel data being accurate, accessible, and real-time, the problem remains stubbornly unsolved at scale – and so that leaves a lot of opportunities for a company like Dida to address.
James Jin: “AI will have all the static data in the world, but it doesn’t know real-time prices, and it doesn’t have enough hotel content – reviews, dynamic amenities. Those are the abilities we need to build, and we need to be always AI-ready for that.”
As to the impact of AI on B2B companies like Dida, Jin believes the traffic model will change: “It will go from OTA search engines to agents. Everyone’s saying that, and I feel like it hasn’t come yet, but I think in the future it will come.”
When it does, the question for companies like Dida is whether they sit between the agent and the supplier or get disintermediated by both. His answer, again, comes back to supply chain. An AI agent booking travel on someone’s behalf still needs live pricing, accurate availability, and rich content to make a trustworthy recommendation.
The entity that holds and distributes that data reliably, at scale, across markets that are not yet digital, retains its position. The B2B layer does not disappear. It becomes, if anything, more critical, because the agent needs to trust its data source, and trust in B2B travel, as Jin noted, is earned over years of relationships.
He cited an example. When Dida first entered international markets – Jin’s first global event was ITB Berlin in 2014 – the challenge was never technology. “It doesn’t work that way in most places. It’s all about business people. You need to earn trust over a long time.”
The companies that built those relationships, that did the slow work of localisation and respect, are the ones that will have partners willing to pipe their inventory through AI-facing interfaces.
In conclusion, Jin said that Dida has survived and grown by being systematically undramatic. They did not burn cash to win market share when Chinese competitors were doing so. When COVID hit and Dida’s business dropped 90% overnight, the company survived because it had always watched its cash flow.
“If we fail, can we still stand up again?” That question is asked before every investment, and that hasn’t changed in 14 years.
