2023-05-12
Moderator: George CAO, CEO of Dragon Trail International
Panelists:
1. FANG Tengfei, Vice President of Tencent Cloud/General Manager of Cultural and Tourism Industry, Tencent
2. SONG Yingqiao, General Manager of MNC Key Account Division, Intelligent International Department of Ali Cloud
3. PENG Lun, General Manager of Travel, China, Google
4. JIANG Lieyi, CEO of Future Plus Technologies (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
5. JIAO Leizhi, Director, Culture, Tourism and Sports Service Department, China Unicom
Full text:
George CAO: We have been digitalizing the tourism industry over these years, including destinations and tourism companies, so my first question is: what do you think we have been doing right, and what is wrong? Are there any particularly good practices you would like to share? Let’s give the floor first to Mr. Fang.
FANG Tengfei: A great exploration and practice, especially in the field of digitalization, doesn’t have to be perfect and impeccable, but should be able to give us inexhaustible inspiration and strength. Take Yunnan for example. First, it accurately identifies its problems. The key problem with its tourism market is how to rebuild trust. Resolving the core issue of trust, it employs digital technologies to devise many tactics, including allowing consumers to refund or exchange goods within 30 days of purchase with no questions asked. It means that you can shop worry-free in Yunnan. Any problem you encounter during your stay there will be responded to and handled within 2 hours and 55 minutes on average, which sets a very high-efficiency bar for other destinations across the country. All destinations are saying welcome to tourists from around the world, but only Yunnan has engraved its commitment to tourists on a steel plate in the form of government endorsement, promising tourists from all over the world a worry-free, safe and trustworthy visit. Therefore, by staying oriented on addressing the key issue, Yunnan’s practice in tourism digitalization is a bold move that no other destinations in the country have dared to take. This is not something technology can fix; it requires a remarkable insight into and pinning down one’s problems.
I remember that in the process of tourism digitalization, there were voices in the industry saying that Yunnan was driving tourists away by doing this. But in fact, if we take a longer-term perspective, in addition to natural endowments, rich tourism resources, and accurate municipal strategies, I think Yunnan now has a golden signboard of trust, which is built by its promotion of digital technology. At the same time, strong governance methods such as the “1+16+100+X” approach are combined with digital technology to enable leapfrog development.
George CAO: Thank you, Mr. Fang, for sharing with us the success story of Yunnan which has set a benchmark in digitalization. My next question is for Mr. Song: from Alibaba Cloud’s point of view, what do you think makes good destination digitalization? What good practices do you have?
SONG Yingqiao: For a technology company like Alibaba Cloud, we empower all industries through digitalization, including the travel industry. Mr. Cao asked about what made a good benchmark.
In my opinion, the first keyword is all-inclusive, covering tourists, scenic spots, regulators or safety supervisors, and at the same time, from before to after the tour. All this should go digital.
The second is intelligence. As you can see, ChatGPT is also doing artificial intelligence on the basis of data. What AI can do to serve the above-mentioned three stakeholders in the three stages: before, during, and after the tour? We can imagine that if a tourist wants to go to some destination, he or she can go there and pick up an IOT device which will, first of all, collect your data, such as your name, sex, age, hobbies, etc., and give you an AR experience before the tour. Or you can enjoy a real-time immersive display at the scenic spot. These are all digital experiences.
The third is AI-assisted personalized recommendations. Marketing before, during, and after the tour can all be realized. We can even provide some MR and digital product collections for tourists after the tour, and realize online and offline connections.
Let’s go back to the tourist experience. The tourists, the operators of scenic spots, and safety authorities can all benefit from the convenience brought by the whole digital, intelligent process. So the three keywords are all-inclusive, intelligence, and experience.
George CAO: The next speaker is Mr. Peng. Unlike the two local high-tech companies, Google is a global company and empowers domestic destinations mainly through its overseas promotion. From your point of view, what makes good destination digitalization? And what best practices do you want to share?
PENG Lun: First, as we all know, before the pandemic, outbound tourism consisted of a lion’s share of the tourism market, and you can also see that last year, as the pandemic improved slightly, overseas tourism was on the rise. Due to this shift, overseas marketing revenue accounted for a large part of corporate revenue in many companies last year. Let me give you an example. In Southeast Asia, a strong market of several for our customers, the overall annual growth rate last year exceeded 200% (compared with the data of 2019 in the same period), and their share in the market in Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea far exceeded that of 2019. So as far as Google China is concerned, we are glad that we have helped Chinese companies find a way out in such a difficult situation, and this way out, even after the epidemic restrictions were eased, can bring better growth demand to their entire business model.
Second, after China reopened to the world, inbound tourism has been recovering. Google China has been committed to helping Chinese enterprises attract foreign tourists, and foreign business travelers to China. With the reopening of the country, we work harder to relaunch the inbound travel policy, have developed solutions concerning hotel accommodation, air tickets, and visas, and offered multilingual support. For example, overseas Chinese, about 50 million of them across the world, are definitely the most eager to come to China, and for them we offer services and products in both simplified and traditional Chinese, to accurately reach them and attract them to choose our clients for their trips to China. Foreign business travelers have not set foot in China in the past three years: we could only meet our clients in China virtually. Now finally we can meet them in person, without the need for quarantine and isolation, in China. For these international business travelers, we offer them a complete set of services in Spanish, English, and other majority languages.
Last but not least, during the pandemic, as people were restricted from local contacts and travel, we provided a lot of incremental services through digital media, via a project called “Promoting Chinese Culture Overseas.” We worked with YouTube and other video platforms, tourism bureaus, and media, to continuously increase China’s influence overseas through promotional videos.
George CAO: Miss. Jiao, what do you think of the digitalization of tourist destinations from the perspective of China Unicom? And what best practices do you want to share?
JIAO Leizhi: We believe that serving tourists is the core of destination digitalization, so tourists’ perception and evaluation of their digital experience is the most important criterion to evaluate the effect of destination digitalization. At the same time, we also have some industry standards we can refer to while evaluating the digitalization of destinations. For example, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a draft of the guidelines on the digitalization of tourist attractions last August, which serves as an industry standard providing clearer guidance for developing intelligent and digital destinations. China Unicom was a co-drafter.
We believe that what’s more important for the digitalization, not only the IT development, of tourist attractions, is to build digital capabilities based on local tourism resources. In this regard, China Unicom has launched the all-in-one tourist code platform for tourist destinations. This platform integrates the resources of destinations using the concept of a cloud warehouse. Tourist-centered, it provides a closed-loop tourist service system covering the stages before, during, and after the tour, to allow tourists to enjoy a full range of intelligent services in the destinations, and destinations to promote sustainable development.
China Unicom has launched the all-in-one tourist code in many destinations. For example, Guizhou, Xinjiang, Shandong, and Hebei have all established their own provincial-level tourist code platforms using China Unicom’s products. These products can gather a lot of resources, so are suitable for providing cross-regional integrated tourist services. For example, the intelligent tourist service platform released last week to serve tourists in the Yangtze River Delta Integrated Demonstration Zone and the Union Garden Tourist Code Platform serving the border areas of Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, and Jiangsu are both users of the tourist code platform.
George CAO: Thank you. We have discussed how to digitalize. Now let’s move on to the interesting part. We mentioned ChatGPT at the beginning of our panel, a topic that garners a lot of attention today. There are many different artificial intelligence applications besides ChatGPT. So what is the technology behind ChatGPT? Can you explain that to us first?
JIANG Lieyi: ChatGPT is a big model plus big data plus big computing power, a very typical application constructed. Its large-model algorithm builds a bionic neural network, which is defined as deep AI.
The human brain’s neural network has 10.3 billion contact points, and it is necessary to build a bionic thing, which is the basis of a large model. With such a neural network of the brain, we must feed it with massive data. For instance, a large model like ChatGPT needs hundreds of billions of big data for training. The combination of the two will result in deep learning on their own, learning to simulate the way people think and talk, and simulate our thinking logic.
Therefore, if you’ve tried ChatGPT, you will find that no matter what question you ask, it always gives you an impression that it is full of confidence that whatever it said is right, and even that its logic is perfect, the arguments solid and arranged in a logical manner. The reason why you have such an impression is because the trained result is able to simulate human habits, and can even learn how to better persuade others, influence other people’s discourse, and even logic. It can have really good use. It represents a huge leap.
Moreover, with the massive amount of data, AI is omniscient and has sound thinking logic and large computing power. It needs a huge computing power to operate. Model training at the scale of ChatGPT needs to use a lot of GPUs. For example, ChatGPT used tens of thousands of the top-rate GPU A100 for training, and a GPU A100 will cost more than 10,000 US dollars, bringing the total to millions of dollars, and raising the technology and investment bar high. Even if you have the money required, it won’t do if you don’t have companies with massive data sources. It needs more than money; it also needs resources. That’s why the technology is in the hands of those top tech companies.