Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu: Building a Fully Connected, Intelligent World

At the Huawei Global Analyst Summit held in Shenzhen on April 17, 2018, Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu proposed Huawei's vision and plan to build a fully connected, intelligent world to benefit every person, home, and organization. In this way, they can enjoy the benefits of digitalization and intelligentization in life, work, learning, and health.

Eric Xu said that "In the past few years, I introduced Huawei's key points at the strategic level, such as the all cloud-based product solution strategy and service strategy. At the last year's Huawei Global Analyst Summit, I also gave a brief introduction to the positioning of AI in Huawei. We regard AI as enabling technology and hope to integrate AI technology with Huawei products and solutions. After a year of thinking and practice, we have developed further thinking and solutions. In general, we hope to introduce AI technology into our smart terminals, cloud, and networks to make our solutions more competitive, improve service experience, and bring more business value to customers.

In the network aspect, at the 2014 Huawei Global Analyst Summit, I introduced operators' data center-centric network architecture, which is called SoftCOM. SoftCOM is actually the cloudification of the entire telecom network. This architecture is based on the continuous innovation of All IP and All Cloud. Today, we are introducing AI into the SoftCOM architecture and solutions to form a new-generation innovative architecture, which is called SoftCOM AI. At last year's Huawei Global Analyst Summit, I mentioned that the overall industry status of the telecom industry is unhealthy. We hope to introduce AI technology to build an "automated driving and never faulty" network, and use architecture innovation to fundamentally solve the structural problems of the telecom industry and realize automation, autonomy, self-healing, and self-optimization of the telecom network, greatly improving the network utilization and O&M efficiency. This new network architecture will bring great value to end users, operators, and equipment vendors. Only innovation that benefits the entire industry chain can truly lead the healthy development of the industry. Specifically, customers will obtain the minute-level ROADS experience, best network connections, and the availability of uninterrupted networks. Operators will multiply their O&M efficiency, resource utilization efficiency, and energy consumption efficiency. The efficiency is expected to increase by 10 times in the future. Equipment vendors will obtain the benefits brought by new intelligent features of products, increase the service efficiency, and obtain installed base benefits through services within the lifecycle. We strive to combine AI technology with entire network solutions to provide automated driving networks and solve the problems of low efficiency and high cost in the telecom industry. This may be the cure for changing the development of the entire telecom industry from unhealthy development to healthy development.

In the mobile phone field, we have always emphasized that we need to move from smart phones to intelligent phones and have been trying hard. In December 2016, we released a mobile phone with some intelligent functions, that is, Honor Magic. Last year, we released phone chip Kirin 970 with a built-in NPU and used it on all flagship models released later, from Mate10 to the latest P20. This enables mobile phones to understand you more and have more powerful visual, auditory, and touch sensation, greatly improving the experience of mobile phones in photographing and voice processing. In addition, to enable all partners and developers around the world to develop various applications based on the capabilities of the AI processors provided by our chips, we also build the HiAI platform to expose the AI capabilities of cloud, terminal, and chip layers. In this way, all industry partners can develop various AI mobile phones on the HiAI platform to provide better user experience and enable the entire industry to benefit from phone intelligentazation.

In the cloud field, we officially released HUAWEI CLOUD in the year before last year. Last year, we consolidated all Huawei cloud resources and set up Cloud BU. The mission of Cloud BU is to become the "black soil" for government and enterprise digitalization and build a real cloud platform. At the same time, we hope that all partners can develop and deploy various apps on HUAWEI CLOUD to solve the problems faced by governments and enterprises during digitalization and intelligentization. We hope to provide HUAWEI CLOUD with its trustworthy technologies and deep insights into the future to bring Huawei's technologies, services, and experiences accumulated over the past 30+ years to all customers and partners. At the same time, we also introduce AI technology services on HUAWEI CLOUD to build an Enterprise Intelligence (EI) platform. Through the EI platform, all enterprises and governments can use AI to provide various products and services, which makes it easier and more convenient to improve the enterprise efficiency and increase create value.

In summary, we positioned AI as enabling technology last year to improve the competitiveness of Huawei's products and solutions for customers. After a year of thinking and practice, we propose to combine AI with intelligent terminals, networks, and cloud to provide better user experience and create value for customers."