Companies join hands to hold innovative tech contest

Artificial intelligence was born to solve real-life problems as opposed to only being for research use, and more efforts are needed from traditional companies to push forward the digital transformation, according to industry experts.

They made the comments as the dairy giant Mengniu Group, leading AI company 4Paradigm, and Haier Group subsidiary HCH Ventures joined hands to hold an innovative technology competition recently.

Dubbed as Niukesong, the competition has a prize pool of 600,000 yuan ($93,959) for competitors who are able to leverage forefront technologies including AI, cloud computing and internet of things to offer innovative solutions in digitalization and intelligent transformation across industries.

"Although implementing AI technology has still faced many problems, digitalization is the foundation for the transformation and upgrading of companies. We are able to help more companies to better realize AI intelligent decision-making capabilities," said Pei Misi, president of 4Paradigm.

According to Gao Fei, senior vice-president of Mengniu Group, traditional dairy giants now firmly seek to deepen digitalization and promote intelligent technological development in the industry, and that's the impetus behind the competition. 

"In the face of new consumer scenarios and demand, traditional dairy companies have broken the boundaries and started to march towards platform-centric and technology-based solutions through iterative upgrades," Gao said.