Tech giants to foster smart revolution

With the booming artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data technologies, China is shaping up to be one of the leading innovators amid the new round of digital transformation and smart revolution, top executives of tech firms said on Thursday.

"Buoyed by the development of the internet of things, the next-generation 5G and other new technologies, smart technologies are deeply integrated with various sectors," said Liu Jun, executive vice-president of Lenovo and president of Lenovo China, during the ongoing Third World Intelligence Congress in Tianjin on Thursday.

Liu said the deep integration between AI and manufacturing, retail, finance and other sectors will help improve efficiency, boost productivity and foster innovative business models.

China's digital economy accounted for 34.8 percent of its gross domestic product in 2018, remaining a key pivot for the country's economic development, a new report released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology said.

The report showed that the internet-based digital economy rose to 31.3 trillion yuan ($4.6 trillion) last year, up 20.9 percent year-on-year.

As research on smart technologies and innovative applications blossom in China, the country is accelerating the push to leverage cutting-edge smart technologies to upgrade manufacturing and inject new impetus for economic growth.

Lenovo, the world's largest PC maker by shipments, is dedicated to embracing the intelligent transformation, offering customers and partners with leading technologies in fields like smart internet of things and smart infrastructure.

"Embracing the smart revolution, enterprises can effectively improve the production efficiency and offer better services," Liu added. "For instance, chatbots are helping combat some of today's biggest customer service challenges. Chatbots are able to learn knowledge up-to-date and offer services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, helping reduce the labor costs and better cater to the customers."

More than 50 percent of the questions raised by users are answered by the chatbots, Lenovo claimed.

China's leading supercomputer manufacturer Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, also known as Sugon, is ramping up efforts to build a national-level advanced computing innovation center in Tianjin, considering the burgeoning demand for computing power. The company established its base in Tianjin in 2006.

Ren Jingyang, senior vice-president of Sugon, said the center, which is expected to be completed in 2021, will gather other companies engaged in software, algorithms, applications and research institutes to solve the problems in the advanced computing sector and to make breakthroughs in related core technologies.

"The advanced computing center should make great contribution to the integrated development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province. Moreover, Tianjin has formulated some supportive policies for propelling the development of intelligent manufacturing," Ren said.

"In addition, we plan to promote the integration of advanced computing with industry applications in the center," he said, adding that such computing technology, which is developing very fast with a high iteration rate, will have broad applications in emerging sectors.