Hot Spotlight | IDC expects China's artificial intelligence market to exceed US$14.7 billion in 2023. AI will drive supply chain finance innovation

International data company IDC recently released data. It is estimated that China's artificial intelligence market will exceed 14.7 billion US dollars in 2023 and 26.3 billion US dollars by 2026. With the rapid development and large-scale application of artificial intelligence, new solutions are constantly emerging in the field of fintech, and many domestic and foreign companies have announced that they will promote AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) as a development strategy or compete to launch AI (Artificial Intelligence) models. Specifically, in supply chain finance, artificial intelligence is further driving industry innovation, improving industry efficiency, and bringing more digital intelligence and personalized experiences.

Integration of multiple financial services and artificial intelligence to drive industrial innovation

Currently, many emerging technologies have been applied to the financial sector. According to the “Blockchain-based Financial Asset Transfer Scenario Vendor Share Study, 2021” released by IDC in 2022, China's blockchain-based financial asset circulation market achieved a market size of more than 100 million US dollars, and supply chain fintech solution provider Lianyirong ranked second in the market with a share of 21.8%.

Artificial intelligence became a hot topic at the IDC China ICT Market Trend Forum 2023 held recently. Zhong Zhenshan, vice president of IDC China, analyzed that the next generation of artificial intelligence led by generative AI will have a profound impact on personal life, work, and every enterprise. He pointed out that technology providers and technology users should understand the nature of artificial intelligence, possible application scenarios, implementation possibilities, and prepare for the upcoming changes.

As a basic technology and endogenous ability in the digital age, artificial intelligence has become an important driving force for a new round of industrial and technological revolution. Currently, artificial intelligence includes five core technologies: computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, and biometrics. In 2022, the scale of China's natural language processing industry was about 8.7 billion yuan, of which 2.3 billion yuan was applied to the financial sector, accounting for 26.4%.

As an emerging inclusive finance model, supply chain finance, with the support of artificial intelligence, is also further improving service efficiency and risk control capabilities, optimizing the use of capital to improve efficiency, and accelerate cash flow between upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain.

Using artificial intelligence, supply chain finance can analyze industrial chain business characteristics, financial data relationships, risk analysis, operating data, online signatures, false behavior analysis, etc., greatly improving the efficiency of data mining and analysis efficiency and the accuracy of data risk control models in supply chain finance business, and realizing risk control optimization and automated business management, as well as integration and real-time transaction processing of the industrial chain.

Big models enable supply chain finance to better handle business raw information

Currently, the breadth and depth of applications of artificial intelligence, including RPA (robotic process automation), OCR (optical character recognition), and large models, are rapidly expanding, greatly improving the supply capacity and operational efficiency of financial services.

For example, ICBC's intelligent customer service “Gong Xiaozhi” based on natural language processing technology can provide services through various channels such as WeChat, SMS, mobile banking, and online banking, improving intelligent service applications for customer service, risk control, and outbound calls. According to 2018 statistics, the recognition rate of ICBC's intelligent customer service reached 98%.

Another example is the AI engine developed by Lian Rong, which uses OCR (optical character recognition) and NLP (natural language processing) to greatly improve the efficiency of supply chain asset collection, document and invoice recognition and verification. Previously, traditional processing methods based on manual and paper materials took 1 to 2 weeks. Now it only takes 5 minutes to process 1,000 invoices and 15 minutes to process 1,000 pages of contract text, saving traditional labor costs while reducing errors.

With the support of big data and big computing power, the current AI big model has better versatility and higher precision. Xu Dongliang, chief technology officer of Du Xiaoman, said that understanding models can be used for intelligent customer acquisition and risk management to help financial institutions improve operational efficiency and risk management decision-making capabilities; generative models can independently generate new data, images, voice, text and other information to help financial practitioners improve service efficiency and service experience.

Before the GPT big model was introduced, machines were unable to understand unstructured data such as images, text, videos, etc. These different types of data required professional tools or models to be converted into structured data before processing. Song Qun, founder, chairman and CEO of Lianyirong, mentioned during the 9th China Asset Securitization Forum when sharing on the theme of “AI helps the digital development of supply chain finance and asset securitization”. “The GPT model can directly understand and break through various raw unstructured data such as videos. This transformation can enable supply chain finance to better handle the original information at the time of business occurrence, better match financial resources with the business, and achieve the integration of information flow, capital flow and logistics.”

As technology continues to develop, the integration of artificial intelligence and fintech will bring more opportunities. Zhang Chenghui, former director of the Finance Research Institute of the Development Research Center of the State Council, said that in the future, artificial intelligence can spawn more financial service scenarios and new profit models. It is to be expected that fintech will continue to develop in the direction of digitalization, intelligence, personalization, and cross-border development.

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