Text: Hao Xin
"Focusing on the AI office strategy of enterprises, office software has been comprehensively upgraded in both collaboration and AI. ”
At the Kingsoft Office Productivity Conference, Zhang Qingyuan, CEO of Kingsoft Office, came up and made clear its toB direction at the beginning, which was also the first time that Kingsoft Office systematically talked about enterprise-level strategy in public.
As a company established for 36 years, Kingsoft Office has experienced the wave from the earliest PC era, to the Internet, cloud computing and then to the current AI wave, and has also witnessed a new stage of the office track from paper-based office, paperless office, digital office to AI intelligent office.
From tasting the dividends of domestic office software substitution to the backwardness of the Internet era, no company understands the importance of products and new technologies going hand in hand better than Kingsoft Office.
At this press conference, following the general trend of AI, Kingsoft Office upgraded from personal AI office to enterprise-level AI office, and released WPS 365, a new office productivity platform for organizations and enterprises, including the upgraded WPS Office, the newly released WPS AI Enterprise Edition and WPS collaboration.
Looking at the entire Chinese software market, Kingsoft Office is the only office software company that is larger than the "Brother Cloud" business, with a market value of more than 130 billion yuan.
In today's many tool-based software clamoring for profitability, how to make a simple office tool into a company with a market value of 100 billion yuan, Kingsoft Office is undoubtedly a model worth studying.
"Today's AI era has given us a new opportunity to continue to keep up with Microsoft and make our products sexier," said Zhang.
If we say that in the past 30 years, Kingsoft Office has spent most of its time crossing the river by touching Microsoft. Then, in the era of AI, Kingsoft Office's enterprise-level services may have the possibility of overtaking in corners.
On the one hand, with the help of AI, intelligent upgrades are made on the three-piece set of enterprise-level office. On the other hand, it is to absorb the product strengths of DingTalk and Feishu and strengthen its own collaborative attributes.
To sum up, today's Kingsoft Office is evolving from an office tool to a productivity platform.
Enterprise-level AI office, Kingsoft is catching up
Kingsoft Office's exploration of AI has started last year, but the main line is to upgrade AI for C-end users, providing every user with AIGC (content creation), Copilot (intelligent assistant) and Insight (knowledge insight) products.
At the same time, the big brother Microsoft single-handedly created the concept of "Copilot", and redid the Microsoft 365 office family bucket with AI with OpenAI, and the charging price of both individuals and enterprises has risen a wave;
In this context, whether it is due to its own or industry competitive pressure, Kingsoft Office has to extend from the test of the personal version of AI functions to a deeper and more sticky toB enterprise direction.
Overall, there are two keywords for the product function upgrade of Kingsoft Office Enterprise: one is AI, and the other is collaboration.
AI is not a simple superposition relationship for office software, which is why Kingsoft Office wants to reopen WPS AI Enterprise Edition while retaining the main body of WPS Office. Continuing its idea of user-developed products, WPS AI Enterprise Edition is also composed of three parts: AI Hub (intelligent base), AI Docs (intelligent library), and Copilot Pro (enterprise intelligent assistant).
Talking about the reasons for developing the above three functions, Wang Dong, vice president of Kingsoft Office, shared a formula about enterprise-level AI office: WPS AI Enterprise Edition + Enterprise API + Enterprise Data = Enterprise Brain. He explained, "The enterprise brain must have a strong thinking ability, a perceptual ability to perceive everything, a large capacity of memory and office automation capabilities, which is a mission that WPS AI Enterprise Edition helps customers achieve." ”
Specifically, AI Hub solves the problem of how enterprises choose large models. Light Cone Intelligence understands that this is also the most headache for enterprises at present, because the sunk cost of the enterprises involved is very high, not only to consider which large model to choose, but also to choose the ability of the large model, so that those who are good at reasoning can do reasoning, and those who are proficient in writing articles can do the work of writing.
"Bosses only care about how to improve efficiency, don't worry about how to develop their own models, how to buy cards", this is the main problem solving logic of Kingsoft Office.
From the time of the large-scale model track, Kingsoft Office positioned itself as a large-scale model application. Therefore, understanding the characteristics and advantages of various large models in China has become a necessary lesson in its early days.
After adapting and running-in with hundreds of domestic models, Kingsoft Office encapsulated the AI capabilities that enterprise users need to call, realizing out-of-the-box use, which not only overcomes the difficulty of selecting large models, but also lowers the threshold for small and medium-sized enterprises. Today, AI Hub integrates the AI capabilities of mainstream domestic models, such as MiniMax, Zhipu AI, Wenxin Yiyan, SenseTime, Tongyi Qianwen, etc.
AI Docs upgrades the traditional cloud document library to an intelligent document library with one click, focusing on using AI to solve problems in various document scenarios, which is also the biggest feature of Kingsoft Office that distinguishes it from DingTalk and Feishu.
For example, AI can accurately recognize multiple document formats such as images, tables, formulas, and PDFs, simplifying the cumbersome process of importing, open the information reading permission of documents for different identity attributes, and clear content levels that can be viewed by CEOs and ordinary employees, and generate documents based on private data of enterprises.
A typical example of the application of intelligent documents is the resume screening and evaluation system. First of all, when multiple candidates' resumes are imported, the system can automatically identify the content on the resumes and do a good job of categorization. As long as the enterprise personnel ask questions in natural language in the dialog box on the right, they can automatically screen out the candidates who meet the requirements, not only with the results, but also with the reasons for the choice.
The function of Copilot Pro is similar to DingTalk's AI assistant platform or OpenAI's GPTs, and its principle is to build an enterprise-level application assistant through an agent, the back-end is connected to the enterprise's database, and the front-end is presented in the form of a lightweight application, helping enterprises use natural language to drive BI products to analyze data.
There is also a typical scene in this - attendance and clock-in. In the past, the attendance data of enterprises was kept on the third-party system, whether it was imported or exported, there was a certain migration cost, and enterprises needed professionals to further analyze the attendance rate and work saturation. But now, it only takes a few minutes to build an attendance assistant, which can automatically analyze the attendance of the entire company every day based on the data provided by the company, and provide reference for enterprise decision-making.
"This kind of repetitive and tedious thing is especially suitable for AI to do," Wang Dong said with emotion at the demonstration site.
Kingsoft Office, which grew from the "document" function, has always been its shortcoming. However, when it comes to enterprises, collaboration between internal people, people and tools, and external enterprises is indispensable, and the efficiency of AI collaboration can be taken to a higher level. Referring to the idea of Microsoft Enterprise Edition, Kingsoft Office also opened up WPS collaboration components for messages, meetings, mailboxes, calendars, cloud disks, workbenches, and to-dos. In the future, like Microsoft, Kingsoft Office will be linked with Copilot Pro.
Since then, Kingsoft Office's one-stop AI office ecosystem, which integrates the functions of Microsoft, DingTalk, and OpenAI, and maintains its document characteristics, has been formally formed, which is composed of traditional WPS Office, WPS AI Enterprise Edition, and WPS collaboration.
In the era of AI, who still runs a traditional business?
Just like the development process of Kingsoft Office, the domestic office track has gone through the stage of informatization and digitalization, and is moving towards a new era of intelligence.
Although DingTalk, Kingsoft Office, and Feishu have fired the first shot, when they return to the 2B industry, the ultimate criterion is still whether they can solve the pain points of enterprises, and whether they can reduce costs and increase efficiency?
Mengniu, a highly digitalized consumer goods company, is also thinking about how to transform after entering AI 2.0. Prior to this, Mengniu had clearly realized that as a company spanning animal husbandry, dairy, consumer and retail industries, digital intelligence is a huge system involving technology, people and organizations. How to use the power of AI to open up the entire system and operate efficiently has become the biggest problem facing Mengniu.
"We need to use advanced AI capabilities to integrate into the deep transformation of the business," said Li Chengjie, chief digital intelligence officer of Mengniu Group.
Mengniu's solution is to use the open ability of Kingsoft Office to establish its own enterprise knowledge base and enterprise brain. In Mengniu's view, AI can be integrated into organizational methods to form intelligent processes and realize intelligent transformation at the organizational level. Based on this, Mengniu precipitates data in the enterprise process, which is further refined into industry knowledge, and then used as a decision-making reference for the enterprise brain to guide the efficiency of the process.
Mengniu is not an exception, and intelligent office is being implemented in all walks of life.
In the financial sector, the most prominent role of AI is to reduce manpower input and service costs. In the financial industry, there are some high-frequency scenarios, such as consulting, financial product recommendation, financial knowledge popularization, return visits, etc., which require a large amount of human resource investment, and once the demand frequency is reduced, it will cause redundancy.
In order to reduce energy consumption and labor input costs, enterprises can call large models on the platform to do privatized data training, learn internal knowledge, and build intelligent customer service applications to replace and supplement customer service personnel to serve customers. In terms of professionalism, the answers of intelligent customer service even surpass that of real people.
Large financial institutions and banks have the ability to fine-tune models and build internal platform systems, but small and medium-sized financial enterprises do not have such capabilities. To this end, the solution of most office enterprises is to lower the threshold, for example, DingTalk's cool application has launched a large number of ready-made tools and built applications, Kingsoft Office provides some out-of-the-box AI tools, and some office software will open the prompt word function to help enterprises accurately put forward their needs.
Jiang Zhiqiang, senior vice president of Kingsoft Office, divides the automotive industry into two categories: traditional car companies and new energy car companies. Jiang Zhiqiang believes that these two types of car companies have their own problems, traditional car companies have a long time cycle, and various departments of the car have produced a lot of "system chimneys", each department has its own set of systems to manage their own internal information, which makes it difficult to synchronize the company's information.
The solution to the problem of traditional car companies is to break through the data barriers of various departments, such as using multi-dimensional tables, intelligent tables and other functions to present data in a table, and can update information synchronously at any time, improve the efficiency of information flow, and share the knowledge and experience within the enterprise to other members.
"NEV companies pay more attention to data governance and collaboration of enterprises," Jiang Zhiqiang said. This means that office software must allow cloud and multi-terminal access, provide a highly integrated collaboration platform, and support real-time communication, document sharing, task tracking and other collaboration functions to improve the efficiency of cross-departmental collaboration.
It can be seen that office software is not just a document, but a productivity tool for enterprises, and after being deeply integrated with thousands of industries, it will continue to accelerate the process of intelligent transformation and help enterprises achieve the goal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Kingsoft Office, DingTalk, and Feishu are becoming more and more similar
Throughout the country and abroad, when the large model swept in, the intelligent office became the most fierce vanguard, which is largely due to its "lightweight" characteristics.
Office software has become a testing ground for new technologies, a gathering place for new functions of AI products, and a leading echelon of large-scale model commercialization.
Although the development of intelligent office is still in its early stages, the pulling effect on enterprises and industries has already been produced.
In July last year, Microsoft repriced its office software, and after connecting AI functions, Microsoft 365 Copilot charged enterprise customers an additional $30/month per user for the service, making the original Microsoft 365 Business Basic $6/month increase by 500% with the value of AI.
Kingsoft Office's 2023 annual report shows that the scale and proportion of its subscription business revenue have further increased. In 2023, the revenue of domestic personal office service subscription business will reach 2.653 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29.42%, the revenue of domestic institutional subscription and service business will reach 957 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 38.36%, and the cumulative annual number of paid individual users will reach 35.49 million by the end of 2023, a year-on-year increase of 18.43%.
Tracing the development history of several office software in China, their growth genes are different. Kingsoft Office started from documents, caught up with the domestic substitution outlet, and served a large number of information innovation and government and enterprise customers; DingTalk built a PaaS platform on top of functions such as punch-in and OA approval; Feishu incubated and inspected from within and entered the market as an independent product.
In the past, for a long time, Kingsoft Office was labeled as "Microsoft", DingTalk was longer than toB, and Feishu was praised for its good use of products.
However, in the new era of AI 2.0, the differences between Kingsoft Office, DingTalk, and Feishu seem to be narrowing, showing a trend of homogenization.
The most obvious thing is that when the light cone intelligence watches the promotional video of the three enterprise press conferences, if you cover the name of the company, you can't accurately identify which product launch is it.
From the perspective of product functions, office software basically has AI functions such as documents, forms, meetings, mailboxes, and Copilot-like; From the perspective of enterprise positioning routes, toB and toC are grasped with both hands, and after embedding AI functions, the boundaries between the low-threshold popularization route and the professional route of office software are becoming more and more blurred; in terms of commercialization, there are two modes of token charging and subscription charging, and the idea of the minimum version standard of charging for domestic enterprises is more cost-effective than Microsoft.
As a result, a strange phenomenon occurred in the intelligent office track, DingTalk Feishu, Feishu, Jinshan Office is both DingTalk and Feishu.
In the past, the office software track was criticized for serious homogenization, which affected the progress of commercialization. When Feishu and DingTalk's ARR (annual recurring revenue) exceeded the $100 million standard, AI was pinned on high hopes. However, when the "strange circle" of homogenization reappears, all collaborative office companies need to find their unique positioning in the era of large models again.
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