Alibaba and Accenture Report Share Insights on Post-COVID AI Development in China

On July 27, 2020, Alibaba Cloud Research Center and Accenture jointly launched the “The Penetrative and Explosive Power of AI Dividend” white paper, as part of the “China Enterprise 2020” series report. Undertaking extensive industry data analysis, the report launches the new “Cloud+AIIndex”, which assesses the level of enterprise AI cloud adoption. A few highlight takeaways are:

• Research shows 2019 as the peak year of China’s AI development. The total financing scale of AI in China doubled from RMB 45.8 billion in 2015 to RMB 118.9 billion in 2018. However, in the first three quarters of 2019, the number dipped to 57.7 billion. By January 1, 2020, a total of 732 AI companies have shut down, with less than 10 percent surviving over 3 years. Responding to the decline, the salary of AI programmers also fell by 30 percent.
• However, AI has demonstrated technical prowess in the battle against COVID-19. For example, AI analysis of coronavirus patient CT lung scan is about 96 percent accurate. The analysis of a single image takes 20 seconds, and the shortest calculation time is only 2 seconds. Whole-gene sequencing data analysis method also has a diagnosis accuracy rate close to 100%, reducing the diagnosis speed from 2 hours to just 10 minutes.
• Alibaba Cloud Research Center believes that although AI is currently facing algorithmic bottlenecks and limited by data and computing power, the technology remains a key driver of post-pandemic economic recovery —— China’s AI industry is currently valued RMB 200 billion, and the demand for talent is still increasing by 74 percent annually, leaving open over one million job opportunities.