Relying On Microsoft And Financing In Place

It is difficult to summarize the subtle relationship between Xiaobing and Microsoft in one or two words.

Although Xiaobing was split from Microsoft in July this year and operated as an independent company, the position of this AI girl still remains in the place where Xiaobing was born, which is the 16th floor of Microsoft's Asia Pacific Research Center. Although during the press conference and interview, Li Di, CEO of Xiaobing company, repeatedly stressed that the relationship between Xiaobing and Microsoft is "adult relationship", but the relationship between them is obviously different from that of ordinary "adults".

On November 24, such countless ties became a substantial partnership, and Microsoft China and Xiaobing company further announced that they had reached a strategic cooperation. After this cooperation, the two sides will jointly launch a series of artificial intelligence + cloud computing commercialization solutions for the majority of Tob key industry customers, and the first batch of solutions cover three vertical fields, namely, artificial intelligence finance, artificial intelligence automobile and artificial intelligence content production.

At the joint press conference on the same day, Shen Xiangyang, chairman of Xiaobing company and former global executive vice president of Microsoft, also announced that Xiaobing company had completed the pre-A round of financing, and the investors were northern lights venture capital and Netease group. In the interview after the meeting, Shen Xiangyang revealed that the financing volume is hundreds of millions of yuan.

"At present, investors are full of confidence in Xiaobing's future." Shen Xiangyang told the 21st century economic reporter about the commercial requirements of the management for Xiaobing. In fact, according to the data previously disclosed by Xiaobing, the commercialization income of Xiaobing has exceeded 100 million yuan in the past year.

Now Xiaobing, which is backed by Microsoft as an adult, is obviously speeding up its commercial exploration and potential.

From Microsoft Xiaobing to Microsoft x Xiaobing

On the last page of Li Di's ppt speech today, in addition to the words of Microsoft China x Xiaobing company, there are also two hands holding a puzzle piece together. After the meeting, Li Di specially raised this point.

"As far as the former is concerned," said Li Bing, "it's only a small hand of human being, which is too many hands for the company."

In fact, in the past, Xiaobing often appeared as Microsoft's internal AI assistant. Today, Xiaobing, an "adult" who has completed the incubation and is independent, in Li Di's view, the cooperation with Microsoft is a win-win situation.

Microsoft's value for Xiaobing is obvious. Recently, Microsoft China officially launched the "partner deep ploughing project" and "2020 industry intensive cultivation upgrading plan" as its core initiative at the Microsoft China Annual partner ecological Conference (CPC 2020).

Today, Xiaobing, who has reached a strategic cooperation with Microsoft, will be able to obtain a series of advantageous resources with the help of the plan. In other words, the long-term accumulated customer resources, sales team, marketing team and even the joint innovation of partner ecosystem, etc., are expected to be used by Xiaobing in the future.

"For Xiaobing, Microsoft's own tob capability is very strong. Whether it's customer insight or customer structure, these are the advantages of Microsoft and are also needed by an independent new company." Li Di frankly said that in the partnership, Xiaobing can learn a lot from the mature Microsoft company.

But this does not mean that Xiaobing wants to take resources from Microsoft or even "take advantage of it". For Microsoft, Xiaobing also has its unique localization and vertical value.

Shen Xiangyang explains that local innovation is nothing more than technology, products, operations and commercialization. "Microsoft, as the world's top high-tech company, has great confidence in its own technologies and products. However, in terms of serving local customers at the end of the line, improving user experience and operation ability, and even creating new business models, Microsoft must think about how to innovate."

This also means that if Microsoft is regarded as a global radiation, point to surface behemoth, Xiaobing's function is to dig deep into the pain points of the industry and commercial customers, and provide reasonable solutions combined with its own and Microsoft products. Moreover, it is precisely because it is based on the local, it will further speed up the demand feedback cycle for customers.

"I believe the future direction is that Xiaobing's framework will be closely integrated with Microsoft's smart cloud, which involves azure, modern workplace and dynamics, so as to provide different types of services to our customers." Zou Zuoji, vice president of Microsoft and chief operating officer of Microsoft in China, pointed out.

This evolution will make great changes in the industry ecological environment established by Microsoft. For example, the automobile industry, one of the vertical fields of Xiaobing's deep cultivation, will integrate a large number of enterprises in the whole process from automobile production to customer end to form the ecosystem of the industry. And they are also the tentacles of the combination of "Microsoft + Xiaobing". "We want to be able to build ecosystems like this and apply them in different industries.

Xiaobing's "methodology" of gold mining

According to reports, after the cooperation between Microsoft and Xiaobing is reached, the two sides will jointly launch artificial intelligence commercialization solutions covering three vertical fields: artificial intelligence finance, artificial intelligence automobile and artificial intelligence content production. The solution will use Microsoft Intelligent Cloud azure as the cloud computing operation platform serving China and the global market, and integrate the perfect artificial intelligence interactive experience into typical application scenarios of key industries.

In fact, AI finance, AI automobile and AI content production are also the main revenue sources of Xiaobing.

In addition, Li Di revealed that Xiaobing's current dominant vertical field is the sports industry. Just yesterday, Xiaobing won the key project of the winter sports center of the General Administration of sport of the people's Republic of China. At the 2022 Winter Olympics, Xiaobing will provide a visual scoring system for freestyle skiing aerial skills. It is also the first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence in the world.

It should be noted that at present, artificial intelligence assistants are not available. Especially in the home, mobile phone, car, education, customer service and other scenes, AI assistants fight fiercely. However, in Li Di's view, Xiaobing's current field is not the stock market.

"The players who reaped AI dividends in the last wave did not really explore the real value of AI. We tried to combine various fields with AI and put forward the concept of" Ai + ", but we found that there are other application solutions," Li Di said. "Many of the smart terminal upgrades we have done are quite different from the previous solutions."

A significant difference is that Xiaobing does not emphasize violence and hard replacement of human beings, but advocates a new bridge between artificial intelligence and human team. In other words, Xiaobing's "methodology" always emphasizes the equivalence and cooperation between human and AI, rather than the substitution relationship.

From such a positioning, Xiaobing can often find the core links ignored in the industry in the past. For example, in the process of trying to help garment enterprises form efficient production, Xiaobing finds that the bottleneck of efficient production is actually design rather than production.

"So we use artificial intelligence to provide a platform to help designers focus on aesthetic aspects through the ability of the system, thus solving the design bottleneck." Li Di said.

"At present, all walks of life are proposing artificial intelligence and digital transformation, but it is not easy to find out the scene that really affects the business core," Zou Zuoji pointed out. "This is also the space where we can develop together in the future."