Chinese AI applications are looking to go beyond chatbots

BEIJING – A slew of releases last week show how Chinese companies like… Deepsec and Bytedance moved quickly with AI models Which competes with chatgpt from Openai.

Now, many companies in China are increasingly building on this foundation to develop products looking to go beyond the chatbot.

Baidufamous for the search engine and Ernie chatbotAI-integrated Wenku, a platform for quickly creating PowerPoints and other documents, has reached 40 million paid users, with revenue up 60% from last year as of the end of last year, he said on Tuesday. Updated features, such as using AI to create a presentation based on a company's financial filing, began rolling out to users last week.

On the enterprise side, Gartner Data and Analytics Director Analyst Ben Yan estimates that more than 10% of companies in China are using AI, up from roughly 8%. This will be a pickup in pace — the last 2 percent in adoption took more than a year, he said Wednesday.

“With our customers, we hear more and more success stories,” he said in Mandarin translated by CNBC. Yan noted that so-called AI agents will help accelerate companies' implementation of new technology.

AI models focus on specific functions such as searching and generating summaries, while AI agents are more advanced – they can automate entire processes from search to booking. One example is New “Operator” function for Openai It claims to be able to make reservations for restaurants on behalf of a ChatGpt user.

AI agents are also about to come to the Chinese market on a large scale.

Tencent The CEO said to employees in a letter on Jan. 13, according to a copy of the annual address seen by CNBC.

“We believe the AI ​​sector in China is advancing at a pace similar to that in the United States,” Joe Huang, head of private equity at Raffles Family Office, said in an email. She said the company is considering investing in a technology fund in deep China in order to capture the local opportunity.

Chinese AI app development creates features that are integrated with domestic smartphones. Apple's IQ functionality is yet to come to iPhone users in China.

“There is also a shift towards increasing user preference for local brands that can Offering advanced AI features tailored to regional consumer preferencesWei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in an email on Thursday.

She pointed out that Chinese smartphone companies such as Honor, Xiaomi, and Vivo have been able to improve the user experience of AI features, thanks to efforts made to improve the efficiency of AI models that can work on the device without relying heavily on an Internet-connected cloud service.

Baidu's Chatgpt-tike Ernie Bot It doesn't get Beijing's green light for a public offering until August 2023almost one year after Chatgpt took the world by storm.

Alex Lu, founder of Shanghai-based LSY Consulting, said that while AI models must obtain official certification for use in China, using them in applications is much easier. On the flip side, he works with a small team on an AI-powered tool to give companies daily insights into industry trends and global regulations, similar to the work of a human advisor.

Half a year after starting development in June 2023, Lu said the team began testing a product for free with potential customers, including a car battery manufacturer. That provided feedback for a producer the team hopes to charge 70,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan ($9,660 to $13,790) in annual licensing fees, Lu said.

But the biggest challenge could be getting companies to access proprietary data, or use AI-generated content commercially.

“I think (multinational companies) are more wary of Chinese brands because of the copyright and legal issues,” Chris Reitman, CEO of Ogilvy Asia-Pacific and Greater China, told CNBC late last year. He is also the President of WPP China.

He said clients have tried using AI for campaigns, only to face compliance issues that prevented the projects from launching. “Local brands, they may be less concerned about these issues, and more trial and error,” he said.

Some AI applications created by China are also being used abroad. AlibabaIts international arm announced earlier this month that Accio, the AI-powered search engine for product sourcing, had Reached 500,000 small business users.

Launched in November, Accio It allows businesses to use a few text or image prompts to find wholesale products – and provides them with analysis on their popularity with consumers and expected profits.

Mike McClary, who got early access to Accio and has been selling camping lanterns and other products online for more than 10 years, said Accio has cut searching time from weeks to a day or so. McClary, CEO of Amazing.com, claims e-commerce sales of more than $1 million annually and is based out of St. Louis, Missouri.

Alibaba.com and Amazon, which he used previously, involved going through hundreds or thousands of results, then individually negotiating with five to 10 suppliers before they settled on one, he said. The “next GameChanger” is using artificial intelligence to place an image of a product into any scenario to create an ad, McClary said.