China's Vertical AI Push Is Coming for European B2B SaaS Chinese giants are skipping the LLM arms race and going straight for your workflows. ## What happened in China China's tech giants are not competing to build the best foundation model. They are competing to own the workflow. According to IMD, Chinese companies are embedding AI directly into specific industries — e-commerce, travel, logistics, and healthcare — bypassing the horizontal layer entirely. The signal is clear in the data. According to OpenRouter, a global AI platform, API calls to Chinese large language models surpassed U.S. levels for the first time as of March 2026. The share of Chinese open-source models in global API calls climbed from less than 2% at the end of 2024 to overtake U.S. models in total token usage. Cost advantage is cited as a primary driver. Behind this sits deliberate state alignment. China's 15th Five-Year…