With the advent of the digital economy era, digital technologies represented by artificial intelligence and big data are sweeping all walks of life.
The current development of artificial intelligence is in full swing, and the corresponding smart product applications are also emerging in endlessly.
However, from smart products to digital transformation, what is the foundation of a company in the digital economy era?
At the MEET2021 Smart Future Conference, Tan Jianrong, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, gave us a detailed analysis of the opportunities and challenges faced by enterprises in promoting digital transformation in the era of digital economy.
On the basis of not changing the original intention, Qubit edited the content of Academician Tan Jianrong's speech.
About the MEET Smart Future Conference: The MEET Conference is a top business summit in the field of smart technology hosted by Qubit, dedicated to discussing the landing and industry applications of cutting-edge technology. At the conference, there were more than 20 industry top celebrities including Li Kaifu to share, more than 500 industry audiences participated, and more than 1.5 million netizens watched the live broadcast online. Dozens of mainstream media, including Xinhua News Agency, Sohu Technology, The Paper, and Cover News, have reported, and the total online exposure has exceeded 20 million.
Key points of the speech
The purpose of the initial establishment of the company was to do a good job of a generation of products, and the same is true for artificial intelligence companies.
Whether it is a digital economy or artificial intelligence, there are two main good standards: whether the company has benefited, and whether the masses have benefited.
In any industry, each company must be the first to eliminate its own products.
Technology will continue to change, and if new products cannot be introduced, old products will be automatically eliminated.
Without studying the algorithms of artificial intelligence, one cannot master the core technology of artificial intelligence. No matter how good artificial intelligence is applied, the core algorithm will not work, and the innovation ability will not work.
China now has many shortcomings to make up, the shortest of which is industrial software.
(The following is the full text of Tan Jianrong’s speech)
Importance and value of smart products
The real economy is the most important foundation of the national economy.
Whether we are engaged in artificial intelligence, big data, or digital economy, we must integrate with the real economy and manufacturing.
Speaking of manufacturing, its products and equipment are now being transformed into intelligence after mechanization, electrification, and informationization.
Among them, the product is the core.
The purpose of the initial establishment of the company is to do a good job of a generation of products, and the same is true for artificial intelligence companies. Only by doing a good job of a generation of products can we serve the society, win over customers, and win profits.
Of course, for manufacturing companies, the process is also very critical. Just like mass-produced products need to design molds, all processes need to be designed. From another perspective, we also need time to do a good job of a generation of products and master the core technology of the industry.
From the perspective of market demand, both the real economy industry and the digital economy industry have undergone great changes. These changes mainly come from four aspects:
First, it has shifted from mass production to customized production.
Second, from a single product to a multi-variety product.
Third, we used to develop a product, the cycle is usually relatively long, but now the product change speed is very fast, the most typical is the mobile phone industry.
Whether Apple or Huawei, the product update speed is very fast. For example, Huawei P20 launched the P30 before it became popular; P30 has not yet fully occupied the market, and launched the P40; many people have not used the P40, and Huawei launched the Mate40. .
Fourth, most of what we produced in the past were popular products, but our current market and customers need more high-end products.
At the same time, a new generation of information technology is also leading the development of various high-tech in the 21st century.
The results of these information technologies are the result of commercialization and industrialization of the theoretical research of more than a dozen Nobel Prize winners. We enjoy these results and feel the changes it brings to our production, life, thinking, and learning methods.
The new generation of information technology has four distinctive features, from the Internet to the Internet of Things, from virtual reality to augmented reality, from grid computing to cloud computing, and from machine learning to deep learning.
This has formed several typical cross-cutting areas, including intelligent manufacturing, mixed reality, big data, and artificial intelligence.
The digital economy we are now engaged in is also supported by a new generation of information technology.
The development and law of digital economy
So, what are the important events in the digital economy? I think there are three major milestones.
The first milestone was "The Third Wave" written by Professor Alvin Toffler of the University of Washington 40 years ago. In this book, he foresaw that the Internet is a stage, and big data is "the third wave of colorful music."
In fact, it is the three major technologies of big data field, intelligent production and mobile network that have triggered new technological changes and gave birth to the third industrial revolution.
The second milestone is the concept of "digital earth" proposed by US Vice President Al Gore.
Digital Earth is a concept related to high technology such as geographic information system, network, virtual reality, etc. The core is composed of geospatial information science, remote sensing technology (RS), geographic information system (GIS), and GPS global positioning system.
After the United States put forward the "Digital Earth", many concepts such as Digital China, Digital Zhejiang, Digital Hangzhou, Digital West Lake, Digital School... have also been proposed. Digitization has swept the country and the world.
Fortunately, my country's Beidou system is now developing very fast, and it can now replace some GPS functions and achieve localization.
After the digital earth, we engage in the digital economy.
The third milestone occurred in China, and it happened in Hangzhou.
In 2016, Hangzhou held the world-renowned G20 Leaders Summit, and for the first time proposed a global economic development strategy for 20 countries.
In 2017, China convened the two sessions and proposed the digital economy for the first time in the government work report. It also proposed that the digital economy should be promoted to accelerate the growth of the digital economy, so that enterprises and the people generally benefit, enterprises and the people benefit.
Therefore, whether it is digital economy or artificial intelligence, there are mainly two good standards: first, do companies benefit, and second, do people benefit.
In contrast, why is the digital economy so powerful? Mainly because of the three laws.
The first is Metcalfe's Law, which is defined as the value of a network equal to the square of its number of nodes.
In other words, the amplification effect of the Internet and the field of public opinion is very large, and if we use it economically, the amplification effect will be even greater.
The second is Moore's Law, which is defined as the processing power of computer silicon chips doubles every 18 months, while the price is reduced by half.
The third is Davido's Law, which states that the first-generation products that enter the market can automatically obtain 50% of the market share.
Therefore, in any industry, each enterprise must be the first to eliminate its own products.
And Davido's law is most obvious in the mobile phone industry.
The iteration speed of the mobile phone industry is very fast. Motorola first invented the mobile phone, and it and Nokia were once the "big brothers" in the mobile phone industry. But Apple overturned these two "big brothers" with only one iPhone.
More than ten years ago, we had three prosperous mobile phone factories in Hangzhou, namely Motorola, Eastern Communications and UTStarcom. However, these three mobile phone factories are now closed because new generation mobile phone technology has emerged.
There is also a larger mobile phone factory in Ningbo called Bird Mobile. It used to advertise on CCTV prime time every day. It can be said to be a "fighter in the mobile phone", but it can no longer fight. why?
Because technology will continue to change, if you can't push new products, old products will be automatically eliminated.
Use AI and digitization to drive high-quality development of enterprises
The real economy and the digital economy are closely integrated to form the digitalization of the manufacturing industry. Now, we need to use digital economy and digital transformation to drive the high-quality development of enterprises.
What are the elements of high-quality development?
For enterprises, high-quality development is inseparable from the support of high-quality products, technology, management, and talents. Only by implementing these four "highs" can high-quality development be achieved.
For the manufacturing industry, it is necessary to solve the three problems of government promotion, expert guidance, and enterprise implementation in order to achieve high-quality development.
So, if you want to help companies implement digital transformation, what artificial intelligence and digital methods are there? I summarized five points.
First, through intelligent manufacturing, artificial intelligence is used in manufacturing.
Intelligent manufacturing cannot do without innovative design. However, innovative design is the biggest shortcoming of our manufacturing industry. Our processing and manufacturing capabilities have been greatly improved, but we still lack innovation capabilities, especially product innovation and design capabilities. Not only the manufacturing industry, information companies also lack this ability.
In May last year, Academician Xu Kuangdi, the former dean of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, made a sharp point at an artificial intelligence conference in Shanghai: We are now engaged in artificial intelligence and are very vigorous, but we only stop at the application level of artificial intelligence. The core algorithm has not been studied much.
However, without studying artificial intelligence algorithms, one cannot master the core technology of artificial intelligence.
Even if the application of artificial intelligence is good, the core algorithm will not work, and the innovation ability will not work. In fact, our core artificial intelligence algorithms, such as deep learning and reinforcement learning, are actually proposed by foreigners.
Although our face recognition and speech recognition are very good, we have not proposed any new algorithms, especially algorithms that can be written into textbooks and become basic principles.
Therefore, if software companies and manufacturing companies want to achieve digital development, they must first strengthen innovative design through intelligent manufacturing, so as to enhance the company's innovation, design, and product development capabilities.
The second is to improve craftsmanship through intelligent manufacturing. For real economy manufacturing enterprises, it is necessary to improve the manufacturing process in all aspects.
If innovation is to solve "what to do", then craft is to solve "how to do". Software must also pay attention to technology. The so-called software craftsmanship is the engineering method for realizing software products. This is what we want to improve.
The third is to strengthen quality through intelligent manufacturing. The quality of products in the manufacturing industry is the lifeline. Once there is no quality, the product is out of value.
The quality problem, for artificial intelligence, is reliability. Most face recognition systems are reliable, but some are unreliable.
Our school installed a face recognition system during the epidemic. Most of the time, it was able to detect it normally, but sometimes it could not detect people in the school, causing the school gate to fail to open. In this case, the system is still not reliable enough.
I think that the quality of software products is "soft power", in fact it is more difficult to do than hardware. Therefore, we must not only improve the quality of hardware products, but also improve the quality of software products.
China now has many shortcomings to make up, and the shortest one is industrial software. We are now going to make a comeback and revitalize China's industrial software companies, and artificial intelligence will certainly play a significant role.
The fourth is to extend services through intelligent manufacturing.
Taking the current popular cloud computing as an example, it has two main points, namely resource virtualization and software service. If you want to use cloud computing software, you don't need to buy the software itself, you only need to buy software services.
Today's software industry and manufacturing industry must also be transformed into service industries.
Fifth, expand the product market through intelligent manufacturing. Only through big data can we find out who the products serve, and better promote and extend our products to the society.
The market is in big data, not in the boss's head. Finding the market depends on big data and digital economy.
These five methods can be summed up for the transformation and upgrading of the digital economy of enterprises.
Our team has done some work around equipment products and intelligent manufacturing, helping some companies realize digital transformation.
We also welcome all leaders, guests and experts present here to have the opportunity to come to Hangzhou and Zhejiang University to conduct technical exchanges and research cooperation with us.