Conventional thinking in business has long been that strategic decisions are made by humans, while the focus of automation and machine learning should be on execution. With the speed of change and volume of market feedback today, as well as the advances in machine learning, Amazon, Alibaba, and others have proven the value of software-driven strategy decisions. For example, most e-commerce platforms today offer millions of products, with a changing mix daily and a changing market, such that it's virtually impossible to manually predict a strategy for mapping customer demographics to products displayed online. Only smart software can plow through the volume of live data, recognizing trends, customers, and match offerings to reality. Alibaba, today the counterpart in China to Amazon, eBay, and Google here, has demonstrated leadership in this area and provides guidance for all of us to learn from in a new book, "Smart Business," by Ming Zeng.