Speakers

Dr Adam Knight is co-founder of YASO, the AI-native operating system for international beauty brands scaling in China. He has spent over a decade working with hundreds of global consumer brands navigating the country's rapidly evolving digital retail landscape. Before YASO, Adam co-founded and now sits on the board of TONG, a cross-cultural agency that has launched over 120 brands in China. Adam holds a degree in Chinese from Oxford, an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute, and a PhD cum laude from Leiden University, where his research on China's social credit system was featured by the BBC. His book, China's Social Credit System: Technology, Trust and the Smart State, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2026. He is a regular speaker and writer on what international beauty brands need to understand to enter, and scale in, one of the world's most consequential consumer markets.