When I met Yu Yi, Global Vice President, President of the Enterprise Technology Innovation Business Unit of Accenture Greater China and President of Accenture's Ali Business Unit, he had just come out of the main conference hall of the 14th Annual New Leaders Conference of the World Economic Forum ("Summer Davos 2023").

"We think this conference at this moment is timely." Yu Yi said that artificial intelligence technology is bringing us a whole new perspective and possibilities, and this technology will also be the key point for future productivity efficiency improvements. "And efficiency improvement must be a systematic process. Point-to-point innovation is no longer enough; it must be full-stack innovation. And these need to be supported by an open base."

Accenture is registered in Ireland. As a leading global professional services firm, Accenture consistently provides a systematic view of the global business landscape, exploring and summarizing the emerging technology trends with the most disruptive potential for businesses and industries.

In Accenture's recently released Technology Outlook 2023, it is mentioned that past strategies and technologies are no longer able to solve the major challenges facing businesses directly today, that building a converging reality of atoms and bits is a necessary way to solve new problems in new ways, and that only by joining forces with each other can we meet the serious challenges looming on the horizon.

Accenture also announced recently that it will invest $3 billion over the next three years in its data and artificial intelligence practice to help clients across industries more rapidly and responsibly advance and apply artificial intelligence technologies to improve growth, efficiency and resilience.

Accenture has been a leader in AI for more than a decade, with more than 1,450 patents and pending patent applications worldwide, and hundreds of customer solutions for a variety of sectors, including marketing, retail and manufacturing.

According to Yu Yi, enterprises are now facing a comprehensive business reshaping and the business logic is changing significantly, "We have been doing digitalization for so many years, and now we have reached a critical point above time." In Yu Yi's view, the source of the last wave of digital dividends is the change of business model, while the next wave of dividends we will embrace will be the new improvement of people and overall efficiency with the help of artificial intelligence.

Accenture is already integrating AI technologies into its service delivery approach, helping thousands of clients improve efficiency, gain insights and accelerate value realization through leading intelligence platforms including myWizard, SynOps and MyNav. Six years ago, Accenture also pioneered the Responsible AI framework.

In Yu Yi's view, to understand the emergence of new technologies from an industry perspective, we need a new structural thinking framework, "In the age of intelligence, a new generation of 'Moore's Law' is also needed."

01From meta-universe to AI

Chen Bai: From blockchain and meta-universe to the new wave of AI today, how do you see the choice and iteration of technology routes?

Yu Yi: We know that there is a process for the proliferation and evolution of technology. This process may not be a one-way curve as we simply think, and may even be a non-linear change.

For blockchain, cloud computing, metaverse and even generative AI, I prefer to think of it as a combination of the changes brought to us by technological innovation. It is not an either/or relationship, but rather a mutual integration. For example, in the meta-universe, it also needs to use the capabilities provided by generative AI, but of course, more fundamentally, it also needs the computing power support based on cloud computing. We believe that three key technology trends - cloud computing, metaverse and AI - will define the next decade and drive the integration and intertwining of the real and digital worlds.

At the same time, we also believe that this round of technological breakthroughs in generative AI will have far-reaching impacts, and that enterprises need to act immediately to make massive investments in data, talent, and custom base models to meet their needs and realize the value of the technology.

Chen Bai: Some people compare the current moment to the "iPhone moment" and believe that the new industrial dividend brought by new technologies is also in the process of explosion. What is your judgment?

Yu Yi: It is not necessarily a certain technology that has led us to the "iPhone moment", but we believe that the improvement of efficiency is becoming the source of new dividends in the future. But this dividend is different from the last era, the last wave of digital dividend is the source of business model changes, while the next wave of dividend we will embrace will be a new source of human and overall efficiency improvement with the help of artificial intelligence.

Chen Bai: Human-computer relationship is becoming the focus of public attention nowadays.

Yu Yi: For example, we are able to see that Copilot launched by Microsoft is being embedded in a variety of applications such as search and document under Microsoft, and we believe that AI assistant will bring a new efficiency improvement to human productivity in the future. So it will be a relationship that empowers individuals with more freedom and more capabilities, rather than a simple human-machine replacement. We believe that AI assistants like Copilot will be able to bring greater improvements to human capabilities, so we do not see it as a replacement relationship, but rather an enhanced, empowering relationship that will not only bring new opportunities, but also help us to better improve efficiency. Just like the emergence of mobile Internet, there are also more new professions.

Of course, the use of digital technology is to have a threshold, just like in the PC era, the threshold is that you will at least learn to type; artificial intelligence era, the threshold may be whether you have better ability to put forward demand, so from the current point of view, the ability to prompt will become a threshold test for us to enter the new world of artificial intelligence.

02 New Moore's Law

Chen Bai: What is the framework of thinking to understand the AI era?

Yu Yi: We think the AI era needs a new "Moore's Law". Moore's law has some basic elements: first, it is long-period; second, it can meet the situation of scale and lower and lower marginal effect; third, it can penetrate into multiple fields in order to have exponential impact on the development of the industry. In the information era, Moore's law concentrates on the semiconductor field, with the development of technology and scale increase, the unit cost decreases; in the digital era, Moore's law is mainly through the distributed scale of the cloud to reduce the unit cost; in the intelligent era, we believe that a law should also emerge in the future to define various aspects such as cost and benefit.

Chen Bai: How will the leap in AI technology affect the future development of our economy?

Yu Yi: Artificial intelligence is a key technology that essentially brings efficiency improvements. It can be combined with every aspect of an enterprise's application scenario, which could be marketing, product or customer service. It can also help businesses in terms of risk compliance.

Accenture's latest Technology Outlook 2023 report reveals four major technology trends. The first is general intelligence. Most Chinese executives surveyed believe that such tools can inspire great creativity and innovation, with tangible results such as fast, large-scale analytics capabilities (58%) and accelerated innovation (56%). Other trends include data transparency and cutting-edge exploration.

In addition, another trend I want to highlight is digital identity. It is not only about the pace of industry development, but also about the broader trust relationship. Personal identity information and digital services, data and other information are fused to achieve a seamless connection between the digital world and the real world. This is not just a purely technical issue, but an integral part of corporate strategy. If companies are brave enough to reinvent the future of digital identity, they will be able to significantly improve their own security and have the resilience to deal with changes in the broader environment and collaborate with customers and partners in mutual trust. Most importantly, these companies will have a head start in creating a better digital environment and ultimately a better world. How to ensure resilience, security, privacy, consent and trust will also be the next step for enterprise organizations to focus on.

Chen Bai: For the real economy, how can new technologies be better used to empower production methods in the face of the proliferation of new technologies?

Yu Yi: the use of artificial intelligence technology for the real economy and the digital economy in the process of combining, will produce a lot of original did not expect to improve the space and field. For example, the original industrial Internet has done some access to the Internet of things, sensors, equipment, but not to completely revitalize them, artificial intelligence technology iteration is equivalent to play a central nerve and the role of the brain, to carry out a larger and more efficient management, which will have an incalculable impact. At this stage, it is still in the process of industrialization to automation, not yet truly intelligent. However, we are already in the process of accelerating to a smart world.