iFLYTEK officially announced the opening of a new track and set off a new war with Huawei Ali

Text/AI Finance and Economics Tang Yu

Editor/Zhao Yanqiu

01 The digitization of government and enterprises has set off a new war

iFLYTEK is running into a hot market for HAT (Huawei Ali Tencent).

At the recently held 1024 Developer Conference, iFLYTEK released the iFLYTEK Enterprise Digital Platform to provide digital transformation solutions for enterprises.

AI Finance and Economics has learned that within iFLYTEK, this newly opened business has been highly valued by the management of the group. Wang Rui, vice president of iFLYTEK's enterprise digital business group, told AI Finance and Economics that after the epidemic, they saw that a large number of enterprises were accelerating digital transformation, so in 2020, the company set up an enterprise digital business group, integrating iFLYTEK's AI capabilities and industrial landing experience, and finally formed the enterprise digital platform released this time.

Today, large domestic companies are entering the industry digital market, Huawei is from the communications, cloud services and the past accumulated government-enterprise relationships, while Ali relies on Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk, Tencent is cloud and enterprise WeChat. What is the path taken by iFLYTEK?

An insider told AI Finance and Economics that enterprise digitalization is a complex system engineering, involving the technical architecture, organizational structure, business model and even all-round change of corporate culture. Faced with the mandatory topic of digital transformation, the first question for enterprises is - how to start the transformation? "Combined with iFLYTEK's own digital practice, the path we take is 'scene-driven, AI-enabled'. Deeply understand scenarios such as finance, manpower, marketing, production and customer service, and build AI applications with enterprises. ”

After the scenario-by-scenario intelligence, iFLYTEK will build three bases for enterprises: "RPA platform (robot process automation), data middle platform and AI middle platform" to accelerate the overall digital transformation and upgrading of the enterprise. For existing industry players, iFLYTEK will integrate competitors' products or services, and will also open its own products or services to competitors' customer solutions. "The digital transformation market is very huge, and iFLYTEK first of all adheres to the ecological strategy." said the above-mentioned person.

"Through our practice and some third-party reports, we can see that less than 20% of the enterprises that have really started to digitize now, or have achieved certain results in transformation, and there is a large incremental market, and only with the participation of each company can we promote the rapid maturity of this market." Wang Rui told AI Finance and Economics.

At the forum, Yu Jidong, vice president of iFLYTEK Group, concluded that the use of AI technology in enterprise digital transformation can be divided into three categories: one is to increase AI applications on existing products to improve user experience; the other is to build AI applications in combination with single-point business scenarios; and the third is to use AI technology comprehensively and autonomously.

With the deep coupling of AI and enterprise business, iFLYTEK has also gone from providing single-point AI technologies such as voice assistants in the early days, to providing "virtual people" with stronger interaction capabilities that integrate multimodal technologies in 2017, and then to digital employees who are now more deeply involved in the core business processes of enterprises.

(Photo: iFLYTEK)

Taking the financial scenario as an example, iFLYTEK has used AI technology to create a "book reporting robot, accounting robot and financial robot". In the reporting process, the machine intelligently identifies multiple invoices through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, automatically classifies and extracts key elements, audits and verifies invoice information, and shortens the filling time from 15 minutes to 5 minutes. At the same time, RPA technology can seamlessly connect to the existing INTERNAL SYSTEMS such as ERP, OA, MES, CRM, etc., and then help enterprises conduct automated financial audits and improve process efficiency.

As an enterprise in the process of digital transformation itself, these solutions were first landed in the business scenarios of iFLYTEK, and after continuous internal polishing and effect verification, they were gradually exported to the outside world.

For example, Yu Jidong said that iFLYTEK Group can receive more than 100,000 resumes every year, each resume needs HR to carefully read and screen and assign to the appropriate interviewer, in addition, because of the epidemic, most of the current school recruitment preliminary examination is online video interview, need to use online conference software, HR needs to constantly communicate with interviewers and candidates for many times, the whole process of workload is very large. After using the AI recruitment assistant, this program can screen about 150,000 resumes for iFLYTEK every year, automatically arrange 20,000 interviews, and improve the efficiency of the company's recruitment process by 10 times and reduce recruitment costs by 50%.

According to AI Finance and Economics, in the past one or two years, these solutions have been successively applied in leading enterprises in real estate, finance, manufacturing and other industries. Next, iFLYTEK will focus on setting up some benchmarking projects in central enterprises and state-owned enterprises, and then gradually promote them to the industry.

A person from iFLYTEK said that compared with other competitors in the market, iFLYTEK's digital platform integrates AI capabilities and has more differentiated advantages. For example, in the digital employee solution, iFLYTEK's leading AI translation capabilities are integrated. For example, in the translation scenario, iFLYTEK integrates its own AI translation technology in its digital employee solutions. For every 10,000-word translation, manual labor takes 4 hours, while the collaboration between iFLYTEK's digital employees and enterprise physical employees only takes 24 minutes, and the efficiency is increased by nearly 9 times.

Only creating value for customers is the real alchemy of AI technology. This person believes that how to better integrate iFLYTEK AI technology into enterprise business scenarios, accelerate the digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises through rapid intelligent application, and create a digital ecosystem, there are still many challenges and difficulties to overcome in front of this road.

02 Ecology determines the pattern of competition

In the past, iFLYTEK mainly provided AI technology for application developers, but in the context of enterprise digital transformation, this year, iFLYTEK launched an open platform 2.0 strategy, and the ecology changed from the original two-party cooperation to tripartite co-creation, with participants including iFLYTEK, industry leaders and application developers.

Specifically, iFLYTEK provides AI technology and big data platform, industry leaders provide typical scenarios, expert knowledge bases and business models, and iFLYTEK and industry leaders work together to develop the industry's common "baseline base", and then open the scene to application developers.

The intellectual property rights and external promotion benefits of this baseline base will be shared with partners. "For leading enterprises and some complex scenarios with long investment cycles, this is a set of practical and effective methods that we have practiced." Wang Rui, vice president of the enterprise digital business group, said.

What are the benefits of this new model of collaboration? In a media interview, Wu Xiaoru, president of iFLYTEK, explained that the problems to be solved in the industry are usually very diverse, and industry leaders can help sort out some key issues and provide a large amount of industry data and knowledge base.

At the meeting, iFLYTEK announced that it will mainly enter 18 main tracks including education, medical care, finance, agriculture, automobiles, etc., and will invest 500 million R&D funds every year in the future to support the implementation of the development platform 2.0 strategy with six major measures: standard system, test platform, certification system, training platform, low-code development platform and developer competition.

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