Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Three Norths
Edit | Desert Shadow
Zhidong reported on December 13 that recently, Baidu launched its "Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0" for the enterprise service market, which mainly includes three intelligent product matrices of intelligent knowledge management, intelligent conference and intelligent workbench.
To put it simply, a major feature of the platform is that while covering the basic capabilities of similar platforms, it also has another dimension of "AI + knowledge management" capabilities to promote the evolution of enterprises to intelligent organizations.
"Unconsciously, people have precipitated the knowledge in their brains and circulated it through a flow platform for others and latecomers to use." A R&D leader behind the Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 made such a popular interpretation of "AI+ knowledge management". This is a new track with few people involved, and at the moment, there is no other benchmark except for the technology giant Microsoft launched a similar product earlier this year.
Wu Lianfeng, vice president and chief analyst of IDC China, pointed out that after 2023, the workplace will be ubiquitous, and the future work will develop in the direction of hybrid, collaborative, virtual and intelligent. The picture of the next generation of Internet technology empowering industry painted by Wu Lianfeng may be far more realistic than the recent hot concept of "meta-universe".
This is also a major starting point for Baidu to do the intelligent work platform of Ruliu - with "AI + knowledge management", it will become the infrastructure for the intelligent evolution of physical organizations in the future.
Innovative business driven by AI and cloud computing is becoming the "second growth curve" of Baidu Group, and Baidu's intelligent cloud business has increased by more than 70% in recent quarters. Baidu Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 has also become an important step for Baidu to develop AI+ industry.
First, intelligent "connecting points into surfaces", a platform to meet all intelligent office needs
First, let's take a look at what kind of platform ruliu intelligent work platform 2.0 is.
Li Ying, vice president of Baidu Group and chief information officer of Baidu Group, pointed out at the recent Ruliu press conference that enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in the development of data, information and knowledge, accelerated changes in the internal and external environment, and increased uncertainty. "In the era of intelligent economy, intelligent organization is the inevitable result and natural selection of enterprises to enhance their core competitiveness."
Facing the needs of organizational intelligence evolution, Baidu Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 mainly has three major product matrix upgrades - intelligent knowledge management, intelligent conference and intelligent workbench.
1. Intelligent knowledge management: let employees have exclusive "intelligent knowledge outside the brain"
Nowadays, knowledge is increasingly becoming a factor of production. However, in traditional organizations, daily work information will be scattered in documents, emails, notes and other media, which not only makes the collection of knowledge much more complicated, but also causes the loss of knowledge assets when employees leave. In view of this situation, such as the launch of the "Intelligent Knowledge Base" in Stream Intelligent Work Platform 2.0, as well as the three major knowledge management applications of "Search recommendation dual engine" and "Knowledge Starlink".
For example, the stream intelligent knowledge base supports multi-person online co-editing and real-time update. For example, recently, Baidu founder Robin Li's more than 300,000-word book "Intelligent Transportation" was completed through the knowledge base. Dual engines such as stream search and intelligent recommendation allow employees to acquire knowledge in a natural state. For example, when an enterprise employee enters an event to do, AI can help find the corresponding person in charge; when an invoice is taken, the AI can automatically identify the reimbursement; and the platform will recommend the content and work template that the employee needs according to his needs.
At present, many people will be troubled by recommended advertising and entertainment content, if they can be recommended to help learn and improve content, I believe that many people's knowledge anxiety will also be alleviated. For enterprises, sleeping knowledge assets will also be awakened to promote enterprise innovation and development.
2. Soft and hardware integrated intelligent conference room system: AI helps you summarize the main points of the meeting
Meetings are a common scenario in enterprises, how to improve meeting efficiency? And further form a closed loop in the precipitation of knowledge?
The choice of Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 is an intelligent conference room system that integrates software and hardware, intelligently connecting people, equipment and space to achieve efficient group scheduling.
For example, before the meeting, users can use the stream AI conference assistant to intelligently view the participants' busyness, make an appointment for the best time, send meeting requirements and participation materials in seconds; during the meeting, the meeting minutes can store the participants' speeches and real-time voice to text, and mark the key information with "AI recognition"; after the meeting, the meeting to be done is automatically generated, which greatly improves the user's review and combing efficiency of the meeting content.
3. Smart workbench: light "work card", an artifact to say goodbye to procrastination?
Look at Baidu Ruliu Intelligent Workbench, an exclusive workbench used by employees to manage work task units.
In Li Ying's vision, simple and light "work cards" make the task system "small" and "flexible"; at the same time, Ruliu gathers work cards in groups, individual workbenches or work boards to facilitate coordination and organization. Employees in different positions can match personalized workbench, for example, the sales role workbench shortens the process that can only enter the system to view and maintain in the past five or six steps to the present step; the HR workbench embeds the interviewer assistant and recruitment management module to improve recruitment efficiency; the manager workbench provides global data support for managers from three dimensions: team efficiency tracking, team collaborative analysis, and team process management.
Li Ying believes that Baidu Ruliu's "Intelligent Work Platform 2.0" focuses on the three key points of the evolution of intelligent organizations - knowledge-driven innovation, agile and efficient collaboration and self-driven development and evolution. The intelligent work platform 2.0 thus becomes the infrastructure for the intelligent evolution of the organization, driving the self-evolution of the organization.
On December 23, 2020, Baidu announced that its smart office brand "Ruliu" has been upgraded to a new generation of intelligent work platform. However, Ruliu actually has a 13-year history of self-use within Baidu and its partners, formerly known as "Baidu Hi", which was officially opened to the public under the urgent need of "non-contact office" of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in 2020, and provided high-definition audio and video conferencing, enterprise cloud disk, enterprise IM and other services for enterprises in Hubei and other epidemic areas free of charge.
After more than a year of iteration, with the release of The Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0, Ruliu is "connecting a variety of intelligent function points into surfaces", which is expected to bring a qualitative change experience to enterprise employees.
"Each point may not seem like a particularly big change, but when these points are put together, the content in each scenario is organized and precipitated, and this knowledge may be reused in the future, promoting a big improvement in the productivity of the enterprise." A person in charge who is deeply involved in the development of Ruliu products told us.
Second, the collaborative office market is divided, Baidu chooses "AI+ knowledge management"
At present, the collaborative office track is getting hotter and hotter. In just over a year after the epidemic, almost all the internet manufacturers with the ability to cooperate with office platforms have entered the game and continue to increase their size.
"The collaborative office industry is already on the eve of the outbreak, and many players are cutting inside after seeing the opportunities in the industry." The person in charge of Baidu Ruliu product research and development told us, "From the demand side, the scale and form of large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises are different, and the services required are different, which also determines what kind of services the major players have to choose after they come in and provide themselves to the enterprises." ”
At present, we see that some players in the industry choose to connect, and some choose SaaS services to connect small and medium-sized enterprises... "When the basic functions are not differentiated, Baidu Ruliu chooses to really solve the fundamental problem, that is, to solve the problem from the level of knowledge." Another insider told us.
Judging from the release of the Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0, Baidu's choice of solution to fundamental problems is "AI + knowledge management". Peter Drucker, a master of management, once said: "Knowledge will become a resource and a practical weapon." "Different from the entry points chosen by other players, such as the stream intelligent work platform 2.0, which chooses to make the hidden knowledge of enterprises explicit through new technologies, and become an asset to support the innovation and development of enterprises."
"With more and more knowledge-intensive enterprises, when companies hire a group of people, they need people to use the 'knowledge in their minds' rather than the 'hands or feet' of these people." So, how to manage the hidden knowledge of the enterprise? The person in charge of product research and development of Ruliu then explained to us the popular understanding of "AI + knowledge management", "unconsciously, let people precipitate the knowledge in their minds and circulate it through the knowledge base for other people and latecomers to use." ”
The person in charge believes that the problem of knowledge management may still be a hidden problem for now, but enterprises will not be able to bypass it in the future transformation.
It is worth mentioning that at present, the same products as the "AI + knowledge management" positioning in the world have hardly appeared, and only the Viva platform launched by Microsoft in early 2021 has similar concepts. The platform supports employee interaction, learning, welfare and knowledge exploration to precipitate corporate knowledge, but since it has only been launched for one year, Viva's success will take time to verify. In other words, "AI+ knowledge management" is still a new field with few participants.
It can be seen that Baidu's flowing playing style and ideas are not only to meet the ordinary needs of collaborative office, but also to a medium- and long-term space.
A person in charge from The Flow Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 believes that looking at the collaborative office track, this enterprise serves the 2B market, it is difficult to appear like the 2C market "winner takes all" phenomenon, it needs to serve tens of millions of enterprises, may be for a long time, will be in a situation of division.
"Who has more character? By the time it comes to the finale, who can see farther? Whose philosophy can solve the essential problems of the enterprise? Probably a longer-term thing. ”
At present, the concept of the next generation of Internet "metaverse" is attracting people, and the reason behind it is not just because of the immersive visual impact brought by AR/VR, but because the deeper data, information, knowledge and even the "digital twin" of human organization, social culture in the online world may bring a new revolution.
The concept of digital twins, generally believed to be proposed by American scholar Michael W. Grieves in 2014, refers to the virtual replication and real-time update of physical products or assets to match the real world as much as possible.
When Notre Dame was burned down, the digital twin of Notre Dame was able to assist in its rapid reconstruction. When enterprises face various external threats, brain drain and other risks, the digital twin's enterprise "knowledge" will also help enterprises to seek better survival and development, which is also the proper meaning of Baidu's "AI+ knowledge management" platform for enterprises.
Third, "small steps and fast running", a "secondary entrepreneurship" within Baidu
From the perspective of Baidu Group's overall business segment, the Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 with "AI + knowledge management" as the core is not a significant growth point for Baidu, but it is a major innovation highland that Baidu founder Robin Li believes to attach equal importance to "automatic driving".
When Robin Li was an undergraduate at Peking University, he learned how to establish a set of knowledge management systems, which were gradually computerized, but he still did not forget the starting point of "knowledge management".
In the last 20 years, a generation of entrepreneurs such as Robin Li led people into the Internet era, enabling people to obtain knowledge through information means such as search engines and other professional knowledge bases. Nowadays, with the advent of the intelligent era, Robin Li's knowledge management concept has also been iterated into "AI + knowledge management", trying to bring about a new knowledge management revolution. From the perspective of Baidu Group's layout, its focus areas extend from the 2C market to the broader 2B field, driving the "second growth curve" of Baidu Intelligent Cloud.
Robin Li has mentioned many times that knowledge management is one of the eight key technologies that will win the future in the AI era.
Based on this importance, the R&D team of Ruliu Products has carried out R&D accumulation of "small steps and fast running" in the past year in conjunction with Baidu Group employees and external partners.
A person in charge of R&D of "AI + Knowledge Management" of Baidu Ruliu's team told us that after many iterations, this set of things has a very good reputation within Baidu. For example, Zhu Kaihua, CTO of Xiaodu Technology, chief architect of Baidu Group's intelligent assistant, said that the smart giant screen TV released by Xiaodu for the first time in August this year was used in the research and development process, reducing the original one-year development cycle to less than 7 months; an APP application team with a scale of several hundred people used a knowledge base + search + recommended a series of products to achieve a 74% increase in the consumption of knowledge content. At the same time, the development speed was reduced from 6 weeks to 4 weeks, and the effect was remarkable.
Looking back at Baidu founder Robin Li's speech in March this year, he defined Baidu's return to Hong Kong as Baidu's "second venture". In 2005, when Baidu sprinted to the NASDAQ, Baidu was still a pure search engine company, and now, Baidu, which knocked on the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, wants to become an AI ecological enterprise. The collaborative research and development of the Ruliu team and the whole company has also become an important representative project in the "secondary entrepreneurship".
In addition to the ruliu team itself and the intelligent cloud team, colleagues from various business units are also widely involved. For example, a student of the engineering department Zhang put forward a suggestion for the function of the document-level outline by using it; a student of operation Wang put forward the need for conference exchange based on the knowledge base; a product student Li put forward the need to let the department report the needs of the product to the whole company, etc., and these feedbacks have been quickly closed-loop feedback.
A senior engineer in the ruliu team told us that it is precisely through the abstraction of these massive scenario capabilities, such as streams gradually connecting intelligent function points into surfaces, and providing services to external customers in more departments and even financial fields in the form of a platform. "I got very positive feedback from the idea to the final result, and I felt very excited, like my own child was recognized."
"The direction we chose is not very deterministic, 'AI + knowledge management' is a direction that has a lot of places to explore, so the speed of exploration is a key factor at this time." The senior engineer said.
"Small steps and fast running" is the development state of Baidu Ruliu this year. Behind the scenes, the panorama of the intelligent work platform 2.0 of Ruliu has gradually emerged, with Baidu Intelligent Cloud, AI Middle Office + Knowledge Middle Platform as the intelligent digital base, and Ruliu is expected to provide better enterprise service products for enterprise transformation at a faster iteration speed.
Conclusion: Such as flowing into an important new window for Baidu AI landing
For businesses across all industries facing a surge in data, information, and knowledge, intelligent evolution has become an important choice. If you don't choose to actively evolve, you are likely to be left behind by your peers who are the first to use new technologies. Behind the anxiety of enterprises is the "information explosion" era, individual employees facing knowledge anxiety.
How can these anxieties be alleviated? How to integrate new technologies such as AI with the organization's business? Many businesses and employees lack a good gripper. Baidu's Ruliu Intelligent Work Platform 2.0 is precisely to target this just need and provide a gripper for enterprises and employees to evolve intelligently. The hidden problem of "insufficient knowledge management ability" has increasingly become a new important core issue for the survival and development of enterprises.
For Baidu itself, Ruliu has also become a new window for it to land AI technology in the enterprise market, promoting its switch to the "second growth curve" driven by innovation. At the same time, "AI+ knowledge management" is a very attractive but still uncertain path, testing Baidu's technical heritage and ability to transform technology into engineering products.