Key Takeaways from the JD.com AI Innovation Summit

Executive Summary

The Coresight Research team attended the AI Innovation Summit hosted by JD.com in Beijing, China, on April 15. JD.com has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) research and application in China and its inaugural AI summit was attended by top scientists, industry analysts, retail executives and technology professionals.

• At the summit, JD.com announced its AI strategy and its new, open AI platform called NeuHub. Bowen Zhou, the company’s VP of AI Platform and Research, explained that there are three key components of JD.com’s new AI ecosystem: the NeuHub open platform for technology collaboration, a team dedicated to AI-driven business-model innovation and an AI research institute focusing on partnerships with fundamental researchers from academia.
• JD.com has partnered with Fung Retailing to power a better customer experience at retail stores. Scientists from JD.com presenting at the summit described how AI technology can help offline stores better understand store traffic patterns, customer demographics and product assortment. Store cameras powered by computer vision can capture information that enables companies to comprehensively analyze their customer base and optimize their assortment.
• The newest frontier of conversational commerce is chatbots that are able to converse with human-like sentiment. JD.com’s Jimi chatbot is able to detect the sentiment behind customers’ inquiries and respond appropriately, like a well-trained human customer service representative would.