At the end of last year, in a medium-sized industrial city in the Yangtze River Delta intelligent manufacturing forum, CIOs of chemical, mining, energy and other enterprises gathered together, most of the topics discussed around big data, artificial intelligence, intelligent decision-making in the business landing. A medium-sized industrial city industrial district is so, let alone other important industrial clusters in the country.
At the same time, Gartner released its key strategic technology trends for 2021, and three of them are related to intelligence: packaged intelligent enterprise, artificial intelligence engineering, and super automation. Gartner believes that gaining greater decision-making power through smart technology will be a key proposition for enterprises in 2021.
Looking at the world, intelligent decision making in the land of China is particularly striking. As the first year of China's 14th Five-Year Plan, 2021 will thoroughly promote the deep integration of intelligent technology and industrial transformation, and intelligent decision-making may usher in a real spring.
What does Gartner think of intelligent decision making
Gartner's technology report points out that the two trends of assembled intelligent enterprise and AI engineering are closely related to intelligent decision-making and the implementation of AI in enterprise operations.
With regard to the assembled smart enterprise, Gartner believes that enterprises can revolutionize the way they make operational decisions by creating smart modular businesses that rely on rich data and insights to make more responsive business decisions. Smart portfolio businesses will pave the way for the redesign of digital business processes, new business models, autonomous operations and new products, services and channels. The intelligent combined business created by intelligent decision-making technology will enable enterprises to manage their overall operation from an overall perspective, no longer face the decision-making mode of separation and neglect of one or the other, respond quickly to uncertainties and changing scenarios, and judge and compare different decision schemes, so as to provide the optimal decision-making basis for enterprise core personnel.
"The static business process approach in the past is vulnerable in today's volatile market environment, especially in the wake of the pandemic. "Decision makers recognize the importance of building a packaged smart enterprise that can adapt to rapid business change." Gartner experts said.
While AI engineering is a discipline that focuses on how to focus on various AI operational and decision models (such as machine learning or knowledge graph) governance and life cycle management, which can help enterprises transform AI into productivity. This process requires deep reading, analysis and arrangement of decision-making scenarios in enterprise operation, construction of intelligent decision-making model to accurately depict the decision-making process of customer enterprises, and finally form a complete, robust and scalable, interpretable and reliable artificial intelligence decision-making system to fully realize the value of investment in artificial intelligence.
However, Gartner research data shows that only some enterprises can master and apply both technologies -- only 53 percent of projects make it from artificial intelligence (AI) prototype to production. Due to the lack of intelligent decision-making program capability in most enterprises, it is very difficult to expand artificial intelligence projects, which usually only stay at the level of data presentation and analysis, and cannot really bring about changes in the operational efficiency index of enterprises. However, the application of intelligent decision-making into the decision-making process is the most desired trend of enterprises.
Most industrial users in China are at the critical stage of digital transformation and have a certain digital foundation, but the decision-making process and methods are mainly based on manual experience, which directly leads to the typical situation that users in the Chinese market can not see clearly, the effect is poor, and it is difficult to change.
To be specific, many enterprises make decisions through manual experience, which cannot effectively standardize and quantify the experience, and the decision-making process is unclear, difficult to trace and unsolvable. In addition, the human brain or experience is limited in its ability range, and it cannot consider complex problems from a global perspective, which is prone to decision-making bias. It is difficult to cope with the rapid changes in the market when the scenarios and issues change.
The Gartner Trends report indicates that how to accelerate intelligent decision making will be the core issue in the digital transformation of enterprises in the next few years. By making decisions based on data and business rules, using data modeling and operational optimization algorithms to consider the problem globally, and using solver technology to carry out minute level high-speed calculation and real-time update decision results, the enterprise will completely overturn the past decision models and methods.
Intelligent decision making in China
Why does China have the perfect ground for smart decision-making?
First of all, from the perspective of industrial policy, the country has vigorously promoted the development of digital economy in recent years. Industrial digitalization and digital transformation are becoming the direction that all walks of life scramble to promote. According to the 2020 Digital Economy White Paper, the size of the digital economy grew from 2.6 trillion yuan to 35.8 trillion yuan from 2005 to 2019, and its share in GDP increased from 14.2 percent to 36.2 percent.
In the 14th Five-Year Plan released at the end of last year, the country repeatedly mentioned digitalization, and pointed out that the current is changing from the information age to the intelligent age, the wave of digitalization has been sweeping, intelligent revolution and internal and external circulation are the core keywords of the future industry, scientific and technological innovation, digital upgrading will be promising. There is no doubt that the national policy level has determined the great channel of industrial upgrading in the future, and also reassured many enterprises in the Chinese market.
On the other hand, judging from the ongoing global epidemic and the complicated international situation last year, the external environment faced by Chinese enterprises will become more complicated, with various uncertainties becoming the new normal. When uncertainty occurs at any time, the key to the survival and development of enterprises lies in the digital capability including intelligent decision-making. For example, after the peak of the epidemic last year, the traditional manufacturing industry has undergone significant changes. Technological means such as digitalization and intellectualization have been adopted to promote the connection between supply and demand, including innovative supply and industrial chains, real-time remote monitoring and response, and other application scenarios.
More importantly, the enterprise internal digital construction ushered in favorable conditions. The launch of the national new digital infrastructure policy will vigorously promote the development of infrastructure including big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and so on. Among them, infrastructure related to artificial intelligence will be the focus of construction. Around the basic extension of platform, data, computing power, algorithm, network, etc., enterprises will be ready at the infrastructure level. Moreover, after years of digital construction, most enterprises have relatively perfect IT system and data system, with rich data resources. It can be said that everything is ready only to further promote the integration of intelligent decision-making and business, and open the next stage of digital transformation.
In fact, both the strong guidance of policies and the driving force within enterprises increasingly reflect the importance of intelligent decision-making for the digital transformation of industrial enterprises, smart cities and digital economy. Small to enterprise local business scenarios to improve efficiency; To speed up the intelligent upgrading of the whole industry, and even promote the development of the whole country's digital economy, intelligent decision-making from the point to the surface can play a role.
The rise of intelligent decision-making companies in China is accelerating
If the uncertainties, including the pandemic, act as a catalyst to change the situation that many companies were afraid, unwilling or unable to change in the face of digital transformation in the past, they should accelerate the embrace of AI and other related technologies. So the rapidly increasing market demand also directly drives the rapid rise of Chinese decision optimization related companies.
In recent years, a large number of enterprises, including Sanshu Technology, are committed to the creation and implementation of intelligent decision optimization solutions, and achieve multi-directional breakthroughs in core technology, industry scene innovation and ecological construction.
In terms of the core technology of intelligent decision making, Chinese intelligent decision making companies are unbreakable, gradually breaking the monopoly position of international giants. Taking optimization solver as an example, Chinese companies such as Sanshu Technology have topped the global solver evaluation list for many times, competing with international solver products for many times, steadily entering the global leading level, and even ranking the first place in the simple method and large-scale network and other segments. It can be predicted that with the continuous R&D investment of China Intelligent Decision Company, it is expected to achieve greater growth in core technology in the future.
In China, the diversified digital application scenarios in various industries provide an excellent stage for such decision optimization companies. Taking the logistics supply chain optimization scheduling scenario of a large domestic e-commerce company as an example, its huge business scale and complexity are extremely challenging even in the world, and its corresponding core scheduling algorithm is developed and supported by Sanshu Technology Institute. At the same time, similar demand scenarios are more common in retail, logistics, manufacturing, energy, aviation and other industries.
With the precipitation of time, it has unique advantages in business scenarios, which will accelerate the iteration and improvement of Chinese intelligent decision making companies in the level of core technologies and products.
Finally, the ecosystem surrounding intelligent decision-making is also rapidly forming in the Chinese market. Ecological partners, including cloud service providers, consulting companies, industrial manufacturing benchmarks, intelligent optimization companies, actively promote the construction of the ecosystem, and further implement the technology, products and solutions related to intelligent decision-making in the industry.
2021 is the first year of China's 14th Five-Year Plan, and will also be an important inflection point for intelligent decision-making in the Chinese market. Based on policies, markets, users, core technologies, ecosystems and other factors, intelligent decision-making will come to frugally in 2021.
