Alex Lin , Vice President of HI-P , Jerry Huang（Profet AI CEO) , Zake Lin Vice President of AUO Digital Technology , Court Liao , CIO of Symbio
The annual event “Galaxy Summit 2022: The Future Enterprises” hosted by Hive Ventures successfully took place on Mar 29, 2022 with more than 1,200 professionals and guests registered to attend. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the event provided an online live streaming to most of the guests and overseas audiences. Profet AI, along with our clients from semiconductors, EMS and traditional industry, are honored to share our insights with the summit guests and introduce Profet AI’s “Ready-to-Go Application”, an easier tool for those companies who want to adopt AI quickly.
One of the key agendas of the summit was the release of the “State of Taiwan Enterprise AI Report” by Hive Ventures, which compiled researches and surveys collected from various Taiwanese enterprises across industries, on their current development of AI. According to the report, around 60% of businesses are eager to introduce AI due to the pandemic.
Besides, Taiwanese enterprises have adopted AI to a greater extent. Compared to last year, the report showcased a swift move towards AI adoption, with over 48% of companies surveyed now at the growth stage of maturity, whereas in 2021, over 50% of the companies were still at entry level.
The time for AI is now, if not years prior. AI technologies are ever-developing, to stay competitive, future enterprises must be agile and constantly look for opportunities that’d benefit the organization as a whole.
The key objective of Profet AI is “AI for everyone”. During the panel moderated by Jerry Huang, CEO and Co-Founder of Profet AI, discussing the topic “Empowering people with AI”, Huang sat down with Alex Lin, Vice President of Hi-P International, Zake Lin, Vice President of AUO Digitech and Court Liao, Chief Information Officer of Symbio Inc., talked about how the three industry leaders empowered people with AI within their own organizations.
Empowering people with AI has been a big topic on the business landscape. The idea of “AI for everyone”, is to have 80% of the employees to learn how to use AI, and AUO has been an exemplary leader in the implementation of the ideology. The company has sent over 1,000 employees to be trained at the Taiwan AI Academy (AIA), with about 2,000 AI predictive models deployed that can be applied to different departments. “We [AUO] faced a lot of competition from global companies,” mentioned AUO Vice President Liao, “it required a lot of early-on investment in factories and equipment, we realized and recognized that we weren’t able to compete with economies of scale, we had to digital transform and automate.”
With automation and Industry 4.0 on the rise, many businesses faced roadblocks upon AI adoption, one of which being the inability to find talents. Talents are hard to find, and it’s been difficult to find data scientists. “There’s a competition in talents,” said Lin, Vice President of Hi-P International, “a lot of people are saying that HR is actually the most important department in the company. Half the cost nowadays is labor cost, if you don’t opt for automation, you might encounter some difficulties.”
“Rapid development is heavily contingent on AI talent cultivation,” adds Liao, “starting from 2015, AUO had already started the digital transformation project, and until 2019, we’ve been sending up to thousands of employees to AI Academy to learn about AI.” Over 600 senior executives also learned about AI, and with such approaches, AUO has enabled their employees to quickly pick up AI technologies, they have been able to conserve 20% of their direct labor in factories.
The panelists are also key clients of Profet AI, we worked closely with them to understand their needs, and we are constantly improving our platform based on their feedback. “We also collaborated with Profet AI.” Adds Lin [of AUO], “Many people without AI algorithm knowledge can also write programs that can optimize pain points or help resolve pain points they currently have in their workflow.” The misconception of AI is for it to replace humans in its entirety. However, at Profet AI, we believe that AI does not replace people but empowering them, even to those without any knowledge of coding or AI algorithms, Profet AI can serve as the catalyst towards digital transformation and industry 4.0.
Many manufacturers of traditional industries are now facing a dilemma in which many of their employees are rather seniors, and the issue would rise to the surface when they are to retire, companies find it difficult to pass down the knowledge of the experienced workers. Symbio Inc. faced this first hand.
Symbio Inc. turned to AI and other technologies rather late, they’ve only just switched from their self-built MIS to cloud-base systems in 2020. “Seeing that AI is trendy, we sent people to learn about AI and started experimenting with different AI solutions,” mentioned Liao [of Symbio Inc], who after six months, found out that it’s difficult to operationalize AI solutions, as the company has limited resources for information technologies.
Trying to resolve the issue and further adopt AI, Symbio Inc made contact with Profet AI to explore opportunities. “We were doubtful at the beginning [with Profet AI’s capabilities],” said Liao, “After some POC (Proof of Concept) , we found out that they can develop an AI model that took us six months to.” The problem why Symbio couldn't go further themselves was because of their limited tech stack, their knowledge were quite limited and their system as well as workflow were fragmented. To further adopt AI, their IT team needed to not only fulfill the knowledge gap but worked on the AI models.
“That’s why we decided to work with Profet AI,” Liao adds, now the IT only needs to fulfill the data requirements, they can upload the data to the platform for the AI model to be developed and utilized. “And this is the story on how companies of traditional industries enter the world of AI”. Profet AI is honored to be part of this year’s galaxy summit, and as always, appreciate the opportunity to exchange our knowledge and insights on AI with fellow industry leaders. In the future, we will continue to assist enterprises to introduce AI, aiming for “AI for Everyone” to achieve "AI Citizen / Democratize AI". Profet AI recently launched “Ready-to-Go Applications”, with hopes and means to make it easier for enterprises to identify the right AI topics and deploy AI sooner than later.