The World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai on July 6, 2023.
Aly song | Reuters
BEIJING – A slew of publications over the past week show how Chinese companies such as Deep Search And ByteDance has rapidly developed artificial intelligence models that compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Now many companies in China are increasingly building on that foundation to develop products that appear to go beyond a chatbot.
Baidubest known for its search engine and Ernie chatbot, said Tuesday that its generative AI-integrated Wenku platform for quickly creating PowerPoints and other documents had reached 40 million paying users, with revenue up 60% from a year ago at the end last year . Updated features, such as using AI to generate a presentation based on a company’s financial records, have been rolled out to users over the past week.
On the business side, Ben Yan, director of data and analytics at Gartner, estimates that more than 10% of companies in China are using generative AI, up from 8% about six months ago. That would mark an acceleration of the pace — the last 2 percentage point increase in adoption lasted more than a year, he said Wednesday.
“We are hearing more and more success stories from our customers,” he said in Mandarin, as translated by CNBC. Yan noted that so-called AI agents will help accelerate enterprise implementation of the new technology.

AI models focus on specific functions such as search and summary generation, while AI agents are more advanced: they can automate entire processes, from search to booking. An example is OpenAI’s new ‘Operator’ feature, which claims to be able to make restaurant reservations on behalf of a ChatGPT user.
AI agents are also about to enter the Chinese market in a big way.
Tencent plans to soon integrate AI agents with its messaging and social media app WeChat, CEO Pony Ma told staff in a Jan. 13 speech, according to a copy of the annual speech seen by CNBC.
“We believe China’s AI sector is progressing at a pace comparable to that of the United States,” Jo Huang, head of private equity at Raffles Family Office, said in an email. She said the company is considering investing in a leading China AI deep tech fund to tap into local opportunities.
The development of Chinese AI applications creates functions that integrate with domestic smartphones. Apple’s AI intelligence features have yet to become available to iPhone users in China.
“There is also a shift toward growing user preference for local brands that can offer advanced AI features tailored to regional consumer preferences,” Wei Sun, chief artificial intelligence analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in an e-mail on Thursday -mail.
She pointed out that Chinese smartphone companies such as Honor, Xiaomi and Vivo have been able to improve the user experience of AI features, thanks to efforts to improve the efficiency of AI models that can run on the device without relying heavily on an Internet-connected cloud. employ.
Compliance hurdles
The latest developments also reflect a difference in regulatory oversight compared to the US, and in the type of technology being created.
Baidu’s ChatGPT-like Ernie bot only got the green light for a public rollout in Beijing in August 2023, almost a year after ChatGPT took the world by storm.
Although AI models must receive official certification for use in China, using them in applications is much easier, says Alex Lu, founder of Shanghai-based LSY consulting. In addition, he works with a small team on an AI-powered tool that allows companies to gain targeted insights into industry trends and global regulations on a daily basis, similar to the work of a human consultant.
Six months after development began in June 2023, Lu said the team began testing a product for free with potential customers, including a car battery manufacturer. That has generated feedback for a product that the team hopes will charge 70,000 to 100,000 yuan ($9,660 to $13,790) in annual licensing fees, Lu said.
But a bigger challenge may be giving companies AI access to proprietary data, or using AI-generated content commercially.
“I think [multinational corporations are] much more cautious than Chinese brands due to copyright and legal issues,” Chris Reitermann, CEO of Ogilvy Asia-Pacific and Greater China, told CNBC late last year. He is also president of WPP China.
He said clients tried to use AI for campaigns but encountered compliance issues that prevented the projects from launching. “Local brands may be a little less concerned about these issues, more trial and error,” he said.
AI for global users
Some Chinese-made AI applications are also used abroad. Alibaba.com‘s international arm announced earlier this month that Accio, its AI-powered product sourcing search engine, had done so reached 500,000 small business users.
Launched in November, Accio lets businesses use a few text or image prompts to find wholesale products – and provides them with analytics on their popularity with consumers and expected profits.
Accio cut the research time from weeks to about a day, says Mike McClary, who got early access to Accio and has been selling camping lanterns and other products online for more than a decade. McClary, CEO of awesome.com, claims e-commerce sales of more than $1 million per year and is based outside St. Louis, Missouri.
He said Alibaba.com and Amazon, which he previously used, had to go through hundreds or thousands of results and then negotiate individually with five to 10 suppliers before arriving at a single solution. The “next game changer,” McClary said, would be to use AI to place an image of a product in any scenario to create an ad.