Cui Xiaopan, a female employee with a beautiful face, has just been honored by China Vance as an excellent employee of 2021.
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| Cui Xiaopan, China Vanke's AI officer specializing in debt collection. Photo: Weibo |
Unlike his peers in the real estate company, Xiaopan is made of AI. She is responsible for reminding customers who have not paid past due debts.
"Xiaopan has proven much more effective than humans in coercing debtors, reminding them to pay," Yu Liang, president of China Vanke, wrote on WeChat.
According to him, Xiaopan has the ability to collect overdue debts and other receipts with a success rate of 91.4%. The virtual female employee was developed by China Vanke's Longtaitou division, using Microsoft's Xiaoice AI system.
China Vance is China's third largest housing group and has about 140,000 employees. This business is considered to be very agile in applying technology. Wang Shi, the company's founder and former president, has said since 2015 that China Vance's 10-year goal is to use robots and AI to manage 40% of the work.
A report by market consulting firm Analysys shows that the outstanding performance of virtual workers like Xiaopan is the reason why many Chinese companies have begun to plan to implement similar models. Over the years, China has always set an ambition to lead the world in AI by 2030, and names like Xiaopan are showing it step by step.
Before that, Tencent's virtual employee Dreamwriter was also famous for being able to create 1,000-word articles in 60 seconds, or be able to read broadcast television news of Xinhua News Agency.
According to Analysys, AI-based virtual workers will appear more and more in China. They can be used for a variety of purposes depending on the context, rather than the only question-answering formats currently available.
"With the intelligence and high performance of virtual employees, real employees will also be encouraged to improve their skills. This model promotes faster digital transformation in businesses," said Analysys representative.
According to IDC, the AI software market in China, including applications for AI robots or virtual people, has become popular. By 2030, this sector is estimated to reach 23 billion yuan (3.6 billion USD).
In particular, the use of virtual people will become popular in the retail and entertainment sectors. In particular, virtual idols are getting more and more attention, especially young people. Ayayi, Ling Yuezheng, Angie are "virtual beauties" with hundreds of thousands of followers on social networks. Personal wellness chain Watsons and cosmetics firm L'Oreal have both launched their own virtual idols to communicate with Chinese consumers.
"Virtual KOLs are increasingly popular in China, especially attracting young people - a generation that is curious to try new things," said Mei Chen, head of Alibaba's fashion division.
iMedia's statistics show that the virtual idol market is expected to reach 12 billion yuan ($1.8 billion) this year, up 10 times from 1.2 billion yuan in 2018.
