In the era of AI, how can we become a sustainable and intelligent enterprise through digital transformation?
At the 2024 SAP China Summit held recently, Upstream News conducted a post-conference interview with Dr. Huang Chenhong, Executive Vice President of SAP and President of Greater China, on topics such as business AI, new quality productivity, and how SAP empowers Chinese enterprises. At the scene, Upstream News also had a dialogue and interview with Liu Haiping, Executive Director of ECARX Information Technology Center.
To develop new quality productive forces, enterprises should do three things
When talking about new productivity, Huang Chenhong said that his understanding of "new" is new technological innovation, new technologies, including AI, big data, cloud, etc., to promote the development of an enterprise, such as new e-commerce models, new business models, etc.; "Quality" is quality, how to develop with higher quality. "One is 'new', the other is 'quality', and the emphasis is on high quality."
Huang Chenhong further said that from the perspective of SAP, to develop new quality productivity, enterprises should do three things: first, they can do better in digital transformation business decision-making, and can make full use of new technologies to do this, "so as to improve your productivity, reduce costs, and have better competitiveness"; Second, it should be a global collaborative enterprise, that is, it can integrate into the "Belt and Road", including the dual circulation system, and can further increase business and innovation; Third, there must be sustainable development, "combining business development with dual carbon commitments or measures, so as to obtain a new quality of productivity development".
AI is a thing that "can't be done without doing it"
Nowadays, AI has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and various large models have sprung up, and "business AI" is a new concept introduced by SAP at the China Summit.
Huang Chenhong believes that AI is "not going to work", especially how can an enterprise fully integrate AI into the operation and management process of the enterprise, make full use of and mine its own data and industry data, and produce better and more accurate results. "This will be of great help to a company to make decisions, improve the efficiency and productivity of the enterprise, and be able to do better than others in the competition, and achieve more excellent operations."
HE SAID THAT SAP'S CLOUD SOLUTIONS WILL EMBED THE CAPABILITIES OF BUSINESS AI, AND THROUGH JOULE'S INTELLIGENT CO-PILOT, ALL BUSINESSES WILL BE CONNECTED, ALL INTELLIGENCE WILL BE CREATED, BETTER INSIGHTS WILL BE OBTAINED, AND REAL PRODUCTIVITY WILL BE GENERATED. However, SAP is different from others in doing business AI: first, it does not make large models; Second, use real industry business data to train AI models in real time and accurately. Third, it is related to the business, and the purpose of making it is to improve the business process, production process, and management process of the enterprise, "this is the biggest difference".
Subsequently, Huang Chenhong also cited the latest case of SAP empowering with business AI - a shop selling guitars, which can have 6 scenarios through AI, including "automatically help you choose a location, automatically help you find a source of goods, automatically help you allocate goods, automatically help you recruit people, automatically help you generate reports, automatically help you integrate reports into your financial system, and this business will be opened in a place you have never been to at all". Dr. Huang points out that this is just a simple scenario, while the situation for large enterprises is much more complex. But you can imagine what AI can bring, "so I believe that AI will play an increasingly important role in the process, application, management, competitiveness, and decision-making of enterprises."
SAP helps Chinese enterprises operate globally and collaboratively
Founded in 2017 by Li Shufu and Shen Ziyu, ECARX is the first Chinese automotive intelligence startup to land on the NASDAQ, and is committed to creating full-stack intelligent vehicle solutions, such as intelligent cockpits, intelligent driving computing platforms, and automotive brain computing platforms that integrate cabin driving and parking, and are also deploying LiDAR sensors. Currently, more than 6 million vehicles worldwide are equipped with ECARX's technology and products.
Liu Haiping, executive director of ECARX's information technology center, told reporters that the company began to adopt SAP's private cloud solution in 2021, introducing cloud technology to enhance operational collaboration and solve some of the challenges it encountered in its global development.
First, ECARX has 11 R&D and operation centers around the world, covering China, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, North America, and Malaysia. ”
Liu Haiping gave an example of using SAP to improve efficiency - for example, to meet the needs of auditing, if it is a local deployment environment, it will be necessary to audit the equipment in the computer room, access specifications, and operating system management. "Now we only need to tell our audit company to go to the SAP official website to download a report, which can meet most of the needs, shorten the audit cycle, greatly improve the efficiency, and reduce the time cost a lot."
"SAP has a large number of overseas cases and related products at the level of compliance and risk control to support our global development," Liu said.
"AI has been applied to our sales and R&D scenarios"
When it comes to business AI, Liu Haiping believes that ECARX is trying to apply AI in this field and has been discussing with SAP for several rounds. Focusing on supply chain scenarios, financial scenarios, and sales scenarios, ECARX will break down the scenarios and analyze which scenarios AI can be introduced to increase efficiency. He said, "After listening to Dr. Huang's lecture today, I am very interested in commercial AI assistants. ECARX started working on AI internally last year, and it has been applied to sales and R&D scenarios."
When it comes to the innovative application of AI, Liu Haiping revealed that ECARX will also choose some of Feishu's AI capabilities and Feishu's low-code capabilities to make a slightly lighter business system, and at the same time integrate with SAP. "Like SAP itself, it is very open, and SAP has a lot of solutions to meet the business needs of different countries and regions. For example, I want an exchange rate API or a tax integration solution, including Europe and the United States, and there are basically mature solutions to refer to. The SAP ecosystem has been doing for a long time, so it is easy for us to find partners when we do system promotion."
Upstream News Ma Liang