Source: Kasumitsu Society
Before Yu Liang, chairman of Vanke's board of directors, personally praised "Cui Xiaopan" in the circle of friends, many colleagues did not know that she was a virtual person.
The company praised her for "the write-off rate of prepaid receivables and overdue documents that she urged to reach 91.44%" and awarded her the "Headquarters Excellent Newcomer Award"; colleagues called her "clear eyebrows, solemn manners, and a proper high-value beauty". Whether it is work ability or appearance, "Cui Xiaopan" is extremely popular in the workplace.
As the first digital employee in the history of Vanke Group, Vanke "Cui Xiaopan" is the precursor of the successful penetration of virtual people into traditional industries and traditional positions. The birth of this beautiful employee is inseparable from Shen Xiangyang, a big man in the field of Wanyi Technology and Artificial Intelligence under Vanke, and his "Xiaoice team" - they provide humanoid support for "Cui Xiaopan".
The strong workplace competitiveness of digital employees has caused many real employees to feel anxious, and they sighed: "Cherish the days when you are now and your colleagues, at least they are still real people." ”
With the improvement of technology such as modeling, rendering, and dynamic capture, the service-oriented digital human industry pattern has gradually taken shape, which means that more and more virtual jobs have begun to penetrate into traditional industries: there is no need to issue five insurances and one gold, no tired and not afraid of overtime, and virtual human employees look really "really fragrant".
But is "Cui Xiaopan" really worth winning the Best Newcomer Award, and what is the significance of Vanke's operation? Can a virtual person like her replace labor in a traditional job, and to what extent?
What is the technology of today's virtual digital human industry? Once the scale of digital people is realized, what kind of impact will it have on traditional industries and enterprises in the future?
1. Awarding the award to the virtual person, what does Vanke think?
"Metacosm" has become one of the "Top Ten Internet Terms of 2021" released by the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center, and the industry generally believes that virtual digital people are the infrastructure for building metaversms.
Previously, most of the virtual digital people appeared in entertainment idols, stage performances, social science culture and other fields.
For example, the original virtual idol Hatsune Mirai, the virtual beauty talent "Liu Yexi" who rose millions of fans with a video, the virtual idol AYAYI as an investor by Ali, the original virtual student "Hua Zhibing" of Tsinghua University, and so on. Although these digital people appreciate the value is extremely high, from the perspective of practicality, the value they can create is still quite limited.
Source: Liu Yexi Guan Wei
At present, virtual customer service (robot customer service) has been relatively common, but due to the limited degree of anthropomorphism, customers will not really give humanization to robot customer service. When highly anthropomorphic digital people really enter the traditional industry and become a new trend, it really touches the "inner volume" nerves of countless people.
Vanke "Cui Xiaopan" has been given the image of a young female employee with her own unique "onboarding" date (February 1, 2021), with a specific avatar, makeup and hairstyle rendered by deep neural network technology.
From the perspective of work content and achievements, "Cui Xiaopan" is mainly engaged in finance and risk control. With the support of artificial intelligence algorithms, the virtual person "Cui Xiaopan" detects overdue documents that are prepaid and receivable by familiarizing himself with financial processes and analyzing data, and reminds, collects and writes off "with an efficiency that is thousands of times higher than that of humans".
In addition, with the increase in demand and the updating and iteration of the digital human algorithm, the work content of "Cui Xiaopan" has further increased, and it has also covered the upload and management of employee business licenses, the regular maintenance and prompting of employee social security provident funds, and so on. The write-off rate of overdue documents of prepaid receivables that she urged can reach 91.44%, and the response speed is 7 times that of the traditional system. Compared with ordinary financial employees, the virtual person "Cui Xiaopan" is obviously extremely competitive. This made her an employee and received the "Outstanding Newcomer Award" affirmed on behalf of the group headquarters.
Although "Cui Xiaopan" does have the advantages of tireless efforts and seriousness, many netizens have questioned Vanke's approach, and even some voices have said whether they "issued the award to the dummy and hurt the heart of the real person".
In fact, Vanke's emphasis on the purpose of virtual employee awards may also fall on the promotion and publicity of the digital transformation of its Wanyi Technology.
Wanyi Technology is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vanke Group, whose main business is the development of science and technology in real estate, providing Auxiliary Products of Real Estate Companies such as AI Intelligent Map Review for Vanke's parent company. Software robots have enabled Vanke to achieve a significant increase in efficiency in many aspects. According to Vanke, the efficiency of its AI intelligent review is 9 times that of manual review.
At the moment when the "meta-universe" wave is sweeping through various industries, many housing companies are carrying out "digital transformation". In order to integrate into the development trend of intelligence, some housing enterprises have also set up a cloud digital management department. In the fierce market competition, the major leaders in the real estate industry inevitably want to add some advanced technology color of artificial intelligence to themselves and win a place for future development.
Although the digitalization of real estate enterprises and the penetration of virtual people into traditional positions or become a visible future, Vanke's strategy of awarding excellent employee awards to virtual people is actually not wise. Affirmation of AI work achievements is more likely to stimulate unnecessary anxiety among other employees.
2. Can virtual people replace real people?
"It's not news, it's just that computer software has a personal name." Zhang Fang, a working veteran who has been engaged in financial work for more than 10 years, told Xiaguang She that she does not think that financial robots have now reached the level of replacing human resources.
"In fact, for a long time, there have been predictions that low-level financial positions will be replaced by computers, and in fact, the financial system is getting smarter and smarter, and some law firm audits have long had robots." Zhang Fang said, "In the end, it is some basic work that is replaced, and of course high-level tasks need to be supervised and manipulated." ”
Faced with complex business processes and large-scale data operations, virtual digital people have a unique advantage in finance positions. Especially in large enterprises with complex financial processes, highly repetitive manual operations have actually been simplified, and the issuance of invoices, the verification of collections, and even data analysis have long been separated from the pure human model.
The digital workforce, whose work results are not affected by the quality of the staff, can indeed greatly reduce labor costs and improve efficiency in traditional positions. But that doesn't mean that virtual people or artificial intelligence can replace all finance people.
On the one hand, financial work is not simply documents, vouchers and various forms, which also involves financial management, cost control, feedback and suggestions on business processes, and more importantly, financing activities such as bank loans, as well as external guarantees between enterprises, business negotiations, decision-making, etc. This is not an area where virtual people can do it, and it is necessary to be a real person and a senior financial person.
On the other hand, although the artificial intelligence technology as an auxiliary has made a breakthrough, in the final analysis, it is still necessary to give the digital person a suitable financial "function" depending on the specific situation of the company's industry and business.
This is no different from the preparation of many financial system software, artificial intelligence engineers must at least understand the basic knowledge and logic of financial work, have a certain understanding and accumulation of the industry, in order to create the corresponding algorithms, guide artificial intelligence to work. In this way, not only because of the different industries and specific needs, the cost of artificial intelligence is extremely high, but also the large-scale promotion of financial virtual people has increased difficulties.
Zhang Rui has been exposed to virtual human exhibition services in her work. She believes that the future of highly artificial intelligence digital people is indeed "very fresh" for some virtual exhibition hall needs, but the actual cost of offline applications to run through is very high. In addition, knowledge or product introduction databases also need a long time to build, and the "wisdom of people" is still the first in the construction process.
Even the virtual employee of Vanke "Cui Xiaopan" who is out of the circle has not actually replaced the positions of other employees.
According to Xiaoxiang Morning News, before "Cui Xiaopan" was developed, Vanke did not actually have similar positions such as "work progress reminder" that she was responsible for. That is to say, "Cui Xiaopan" does not replace an employee, but creates a new auxiliary position, which is a kind of "exploration of the future working state of the enterprise".
In this way, even if a more intelligent virtual person appears in the future and can face more application scenarios, it will not necessarily rob the "rice bowl" of employees who "eat by brain" in the traditional industry.
3. Is "digital freedom" still far away?
Virtual digital people have great advantages in improving the efficiency of traditional industries, and also present a huge market space. If the large-scale application of digital people can be realized, many industries and companies will face major changes in the future.
At a recent technology salon, Li Shiyan, head of human-computer interaction at Baidu Intelligent Cloud AI, proposed the idea of allowing everyone to achieve "digital human freedom" by opening up the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Xiling Platform.
The concept of "digital human freedom" sounds both expectant and alarming.
At present, digital people can basically be divided into two categories: performing arts digital people and service-oriented digital people. What is really possible to connect with traditional industries is the service-oriented digital people, in addition to virtual employees, it is also possible to appear as digital financial specialists, digital customer service, virtual trainers, virtual showroom docents, etc.
In addition to Vanke's financial virtual person "Cui Xiaopan", Midea Group also launched a virtual employee "Ling Soul Girl" Liangran and Warm Qin. Their positions are Hualing brand digital intelligence experience assistant and Hualing trend design manager, respectively, and they also have the standard badge and employee identity of Midea Group.
The virtual people Liangran and Nuanqin won the award, image source: Hualing Guanwei
The "Baidu Intelligent Yunxiling" digital human platform released by Baidu aims to provide a variety of digital human generation and content production services for all walks of life. At present, it has cooperated with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, Everbright Bank and China Unicom to launch one-to-one service digital people such as "XiaoXuan", "Xiao U" and "Xiaopu".
For the future virtual digital employees in the financial industry, Pan Weidong, vice president of SPDB, expects that "in the future, every user will have a virtual private financial assistant", who may complete the work of making suggestions for customers, managing the balance of payments, and providing financial services.
PUDB service-oriented digital person "Xiaopu", source: SPDB
Technically, these features are not impossible. At present, the virtual digital human industry has the characteristics of high-precision models and artificial intelligence-driven, including 3D realistic production lines responsible for portraits, decorations and special effects, and 2D production lines responsible for clothing and actions.
Technologies such as portrait drive engine, intelligent dialogue engine, and voice interaction engine are also becoming more and more perfect, which can be used to support the driving and perception of virtual people's expressions, gestures, and limbs. After AI participates in the modeling and content production of the third generation of digital people, the production efficiency of digital people can be significantly improved, and the application scenarios will be further increased.
For example, on the Baidu Intelligent Yunxiling platform, there is already a function to quickly generate 2D digital portraits based on photos uploaded by users. The digital person-building process, which originally took a week, can now be achieved in half an hour.
Of course, technical difficulties still exist. According to Baidu Li Shiyan's introduction, the fragmentation of the industrial chain, the failure of service scenes and performing arts scenes to be effectively opened, and the high cost of meeting high-frequency demand are the three major difficulties faced by virtual people on a large scale. If virtual employees want to truly penetrate into traditional industries, first of all, the underlying data needs to be collected in large quantities, and at the same time, it also needs to generate continuous progress in algorithms.
Virtual digital employees have been infiltrating into traditional industries, enterprises and positions from the "outlet" to the landing. The rapid development of virtual human technology has also promoted the growth of enterprise demand for digital employees and virtual salesmen.
However, in the final analysis, the application of service-oriented digital people is to serve and help traditional industries and improve the efficiency of the real economy, not to replace human jobs. The digital human race track has entered a period of development, and large-scale landing can be expected in the future.