Just like in the movies
According to the recent Bloomberg news, the Artificial Intelligence including intelligent robotics, virtual reality and vehicles is estimated to generate 15.7 billion USD by 2030; this is more than the total outcome of China and India in a year. The use cases of AI are more and more viable across cognitive sciences, psychology, maths, economics and financial technologies.
China clearly exposed its ambition of becoming a world leader in AI. Even the government officially announced that AI is to be a key driver of growth for Chinese economy until 2020 to increase the competitive advantage in both existing and new industries, as well as to protect national security. The Chinese government call for innovation and technological breakthroughs and paves the way to start-ups, academics and investors with all the regulatory support and economical incentives to create new areas for R&D and use cases.
AI finds already many use cases where Chinese companies test the ground including Internet of things, smart cities, manufacturing and finance. The Chinese market is huge and ready to absorb, test and move in technological breakthroughs. Based on China Internet Network Centre data, in 2016 China had 731 million Internet users, 95% of them are also smartphone users. More than half of these users already made digital payments with their smartphones, more than 150 million users hail taxi services with their smartphones and the growth rate of the smartphone users is expected to continue to be 30% per year. Who wouldn’t want to get exposed to such a pool of customer to test and refine their business models, software, products and services and to get ready to serve the rest of the world?
In 2016, for the first time Fintech investments in China, 11,2 billion USD exceeded that of USA, 5,2 billion USD. China represented half of the global Fintech investment on that year. The total fundraising of three companies only, Ant Financial, Lu.com and JD.com tapped 6,7 billion USD. South East Asia, led by China is the new raising star in Fintech and they do not seem to leave the crown to someone else.
Chinese companies merge innovation and demand by integrating AI in processing data for banking and insurance, optimizing businesses, creating new products and services. The machines are trained for deep learning of patterns and behaviours, feeding with thousands of images, facts and figures every second. Just recently, the two insurance incumbents in China, China Life and Ping An Insurance invested couple of billion USD in AI partnerships. The learning curve will be steep and the gap with countries left behind will be widened.
AI seems to be a new weapon in the international competition and the next big wave of revolution. As usual some part of the world is sleeping while the other is working day and night to create an intelligence that never stops learning.
