Zhuiyi Technology: Using AI to empower every conversation that matters, at scale
ZhuiYi Technology is an AI digital workforce supplier (“AIForce”), focusing on deep learning and natural language processing. ZhuiYi aims at helping clients make the best use of data in various functions from marketing, operations, and risk control, to internal employee management to reduce costs and improve efficiency, improve user experience, and drive innovation and growth.
ZhuiYi positions itself as an AI digital workforce services provider, helping businesses to cut costs and enhance efficiency with AI business software. With soaring labor costs and the great demand for smart customer service, marketing, and internal communications, companies are turning to machines to resolve labor shortages and cut costs.
ZhuiYi’s core AI capability is in semantic analysis, or how machines perceive things and communicate themselves as humans do. ZhuiYi’s voice and video applications can meet the huge labor demand for dialogue interactions of banks and telecom operators, covering use cases in various customer-facing scenarios such as sales and marketing, debt collection, online Q&A, and general customer support. ZhuiYi’s AI software is equivalent, in both capacity and effectiveness, to a traditional call center with thousands, even tens of thousands, of staff.
In order for ZhuiYi to create values for incumbents in finance, telecom, and other sectors, the clients, banks, or telecom operators, themselves need to have accumulated a large amount of data for ZhuiYi to start processing from. The truth is, many traditional companies have already accumulated mountains of structured or unstructured data, but they do not know how to apply the data or draw insights from the data. ZhuiYi can help companies perform data analysis to optimize their business operations from the front end to the back end, thereby enhancing labor productivity and reducing labor costs. Of course, ZhuiYi needs to invest a great deal of time upfront in learning about particular business processes and building an industry database in order to incorporate industry-specific data.
One example of ZhuiYi products in the insurance industry is that Zhuiyi can extract and analyze the transcription data of the sales staff performing telesales and distill insights about what keeps potential customers in the conversation and what drives a higher conversion to purchase. These insights can be further generalized and standardized to be applied in future employee training.
Specifically, Zhuiyi Technology offers two types of products & services:
- Engage Suite: automates customer service and internal support channels to maximize operational efficiency and increase revenue.
- Analyze Suite: extracts insights from customer interactions to spot sales opportunities and detect potential risks.
In addition to extracting values from customers’ own data, ZhuiYi has also established an “open, win-win ecosystem” with four major types of partners – platform partners, industry partners, local partners, and advisory partners.
- Platform partners, such as Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud, refer to companies that can provide infrastructure, or play a “wire-laying” role. With access to its platform partners’ substantial customer resources and sales networks, ZhuiYi can reach more end consumers. Building on the generic infrastructure provided by these platform partners, ZhuiYi can offer customized vertical-specific solutions that better cater to implementing ZhuiYi’s customer solutions.
- Industry partners refer to information technology companies in certain sectors. They have deeper industry understanding and more industry customer resources and are willing to experiment technology-wise. ZhuiYi can work on a wider range of industry-specific technological solutions with these partners.
- Local partners refer to partners who have strong business relationships in the local region and a deep understanding of the local market.
- Advisory partners refer to partners who can offer integrated consulting services, and who have rich consulting experience in digitalization, finance, and other areas.
Nowadays, AI software is increasingly developing towards vertical specialization and deeper industry integration. In the future, AI software like ZhuiYi needs to continue to improve its understanding of the industry (data, processes, human operations, etc.) to help traditional companies identify the high-potential use cases for AI in terms of productivity gap and implementation feasibility.
Super interesting blog post, Gigi. In particular, I really liked how you tied in our classroom understanding of building the AI assembly line and showing how Zhuiyi is applying it in real-time (e.g., how Zhuiyi has trained its AI to read tens of thousands of written conversations with call centers). I always wonder if AI can ever truly replace call center associates; anecdotally, whenever I call my bank or credit card company, I immediately ask the AI to send me to a human representative, because I’m skeptical of how adept the AI is at parsing my requests. Either way, I agree that it represents a tremendous opportunity for disruption in the market!
Very interesting post, Gigi! Building on what Jonathan mentioned, it would be interesting to also reflect on how traditional ChatBOTs were considered to be the next big thing around 2016-17, before the excitement waned off given the limited functionalities they could automate and poor RoI considering their training efforts! As you have acknowledged as well, the key challenge for them seems to be the very nature of a non-vertically integrated AI factory and its horizontal spread on use cases, and so, it would be interesting to see which sectors and specific use cases emerge as their biggest winners.