At Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2018, Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG) shared its understanding, approach, and practices of infusing artificial intelligence (AI) to each organization and functional module of an enterprise to improve the overall enterprise intelligence and accelerate digital transformation.
Recent data from Citi Research show that from 2016 to 2019, the major industries that Huawei EBG serves (including government and public utilities, banking, manufacturing, and transportation) will increase their AI investment by two to five times. However, great challenges persist in industry-oriented AI application in enterprises. According to Huawei’s observation, despite the fact that tremendous AI technical breakthroughs have been made to support a full range of AI applications, AI applications of most enterprises are still siloed, mono-functional, fragmented, and general, and cannot support the intelligentization of enterprise organizational and functional modules. We have witnessed a shortage of proven Industry-oriented AI applications.
HengQiu, Chief Marketing Officer of Enterprise Business Group, Huawei, pointed out in his keynote speech titled Infusing Intelligence into Enterprise “Neurons” Through Digital Platforms that to systematically support the intelligence of enterprise organizations and develop Industry-oriented AI applications, the following conditions must be met:
- Platforms that can support the systematic growth of Industry-oriented AI applications;
- Combination of deep industry understanding and AI technologies;
- Continuous optimization and improvement based on business practices.
Each organization or functional module is a digital neuron of an enterprise. Based on the deep industry understanding gained from enterprise businesses and experience of applying AI in Huawei’s business operations, we aim to build a digital platform with device-cloud synergy to inject AI into each enterprise digital neuron, systematically fuel the intelligentization of each enterprise and organization, and build a fully connected, intelligent world.
First, Huawei provides AI products and solutions at various layers, including the device, cloud, and AI enablement layer, to form a complete platform base for AI applications. At the same time, Huawei and its partners work closely together and leverage each other’s strengths. Partners provide AI applications and algorithms while Huawei provides a complete digital platform that supports AI through AI chips, enhanced ICT infrastructure, and AI enablement modules. Third, based on the principle that “we should first apply AI in our own company, just like those who produce parachutes try them out first”, we adopt AI to improve our operations efficiency through the Digital Huawei project. On top of this, we work with leading industry customers to accumulate experience in AI application in industries. Huawei and its partners have by far achieved several success stories.
Based on core capabilities such as chips, algorithms, and architecture design, Huawei has built a digital platform to provide AI chips/terminals, AI-enhanced cloud infrastructure that supports computing/storage/communications, and AI enablement platform including the Big Data platform, video cloud PaaS, and enterprise intelligence (EI). The digital platform with device-cloud synergy can systematically inject the AI applications developed by partners into the digital neurons of enterprises, such as the supply chain, delivery, R&D, market, finance, and governance domains, to promote enterprises’ digital transformation in an overall manner. With an industry-leading ICT digital platform, Huawei aims to provide the best AI application performance and experience, simplify application development, and enable quick application release.
Huawei applies AI to business domains such as supply chain management, delivery, finance, and internal audit to improve internal operations efficiency and quality. Take the AI application in the supply chain as an example. Huawei applies AI to logistics and digital warehousing, feeds machine learning models with the historical shipment data, overall system configuration, and basic tally and packaging rules, and enables systems to generate warning information based on new codes. In this way, the estimation accuracy has been increased from 30% to 80%. In addition, AI can optimize picking routes, improving the efficiency by more than 30%. AI can also optimize loading and unloading operations of trucks, increasing the number of mixed orders processed per vehicle by more than five times. AI also shortens the container detection and identification service time, improving the efficiency by over 10 times. These practices accelerate the digital transformation of traditional logistics enterprises.
Take the AI application in Smart City construction as an example. Huawei AI-enabled video cloud solution has the first all-cloud architecture in the industry. It leverages hundreds of AI algorithms on hybrid clouds to provide global video sharing, remote browsing, and remote retrieval, making multiple breakthroughs in the public safety field. This solution has improved the case resolution rate by 50% and reduced the public traffic accident rate by 18%. Huawei has applied AI to traffic management systems for assisting law enforcement and Big Data-based decision-making, thereby improving law enforcement efficiency by 34%, decreasing the manual review workload of traffic police by 47%, and reducing the average vehicle waiting time by 24%.
