Huawei divulges enterprise AI strategy

The Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG) aims to work with partners to drive digital transformation for enterprises and build a fully connected, intelligent world. The company shared its strategy to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to digital transformation at the Huawei Global Analyst Summit (HGAS) 2018 in Shenzhen, China. 

According to Citi Research, the industries that Huawei EBG serves - including government and public utilities, banking, manufacturing, and transportation - will increase their AI investment by two to five times from 2016 to 2019. Despite the upbeat forecasts, Huawei observes that AI applications of most enterprises are still siloed, mono-functional, fragmented, and cannot support the "intelligentisation" of organisational and functional enterprise requirements. 

Heng Qiu, CMO, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei, said in his keynote that there is a dearth of proven industry-oriented artificial intelligence (AI) applications today despite the interest in AI. He believes that industry-oriented AI applications will only take root if there are: 

- Platforms that can support the systematic growth of industry-oriented AI applications;

- A combination of deep industry understanding and AI technologies; and

- Continuous optimisation and improvement based on business practices.

Using the analogy of different business operations and functions as individual digital neurons and an enterprise being a brain, Huawei plans to build a digital platform that can infuse neurons with AI to make them more intelligent. Once the neurons have been "intelligentised" the enterprise they are part of will also become more intelligent, in turn leading to a more intelligent, connected world. 

Huawei has combined its expertise running the enterprise businesses and experience of applying AI to its own business operations to this AI strategy:

- First, Huawei has provided AI products and solutions for different parts of the ecosystem, including the device, cloud, and AI enablement layers, to form a complete platform base for AI applications. The platform is designed to simplify application development and enable quick time-to-market.

- Huawei and its partners will work closely together and leverage each other's strengths. Partners will provide AI applications and algorithms while Huawei provides AI chips, AI-enhanced cloud infrastructure that supports computing, storage, and communications, and AI enablement modules through the platform. Solutions for AI enablement include a big data platform, video cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and enterprise intelligence (EI). 

- Third, based on the principle that products must first be tested in-house, Huawei has adopted AI to improve our operations efficiency through the Digital Huawei project. 

- Huawei will work with leading customers in different verticals to accumulate experience about applied AI. Huawei and its partners have so far achieved several success stories.

Huawei applies AI to business domains such as supply chain management, delivery, finance, and internal audit to improve internal operations efficiency and quality. For the supply chain, Huawei has applied AI to logistics and digital warehousing, and fed machine learning models with the historical shipment data, overall system configuration, and basic tally and packaging rules. Benefits have included:

- An increase in estimation accuracy, from 30% to 80%. 

- Optimised picking routes within warehouses, improving efficiency by more than 30%. 

- More productive loading and unloading operations for trucks, increasing the number of mixed orders processed per vehicle by more than five times. 

- Shorter container detection and identification service times, improving the efficiency by over 10 times. 

For smart city construction Huawei has an AI-enabled video cloud solution with 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 field of public safety. This solution has improved case resolution rate by 50% and reduced the public traffic accident rate by 18%. 

Huawei has also 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%.

Source: Huawei. Heng Qiu delivered a keynote speech at HGAS 2018.