Author丨Li Yangxia
Editor丨Chen Caixian
This is 2021, the second year of the impact of the epidemic, and the team of Baolong Commercial and Yueshang Technology raised a thought-provoking question when they made a review of digitalization and innovation. At that time, it was also the second year that Chen Deli, known as the "business magician", was appointed as the new co-president of Powerlong Real Estate, executive director and chief executive officer of Powerlong Commercial, and he adhered to the pragmatic and enterprising concept of using technology and pan-content innovation, especially at this moment when the industry environment has changed dramatically, his requirements for digitalization have reached a new height: it must produce direct and effective value to the business.
This is a challenge for the team at Yueshang and Tencent.
Two years later, in November, the Powerlong Business Annual Conference was held in Shanghai, and in the visual impact of steel and heavy industry, Chen Deli demonstrated Powerlong Business's leading achievements in digitalization: using AI to achieve large-scale automated operations and business efficiency, surpassing the "old tools" of traditional digitalization. For Powerlong Business, AI is the core capability that impacts the future, and digitalization has become a necessary component of "common thinking" in operations, and is no longer a dispensable add-on.
Doing so is fraught with twists and turns. Wu Bichuan, CEO of Yueshang Technology and Chief Innovation Officer of Baolong Commercial, was interviewed by Leifeng.com and in-depth AI exploration of Baolong Business in the past two years. In his view, in fact, "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" has long been the consensus and basic pursuit of digitalization, but in the field of business operations, it is a "person-to-person" based industry, in the case of no change in the business model, the traditional ERP and any tools attached to the operation of people, in fact, are difficult to produce real results, this limitation has been shown in the past 10 years.
This requires a more powerful engine – AI. Wu Bichuan said, "We are all from the business, we know that data plus effective AI will have a powerful effect, in fact, in the early days of entrepreneurship thought about using AI to skip the traditional ERP, but helplessly the data base of the entire industry is very primitive, and the past AI tools are not eating the world's fireworks, we have been waiting for a long time, in the waiting period, we use Baolong's environment, dead data." ”
"Dead" data
It is understood that Powerlong Commercial began to provide commercial operation services to developers, tenants and owners of retail commercial properties in 2007, and was listed in Hong Kong at the end of 2019, becoming the first commercial operation stock in China.
Baolong Business is an early enterprise in the industry to do digitalization, and began to build various ERP systems very early, but needless to say, the system itself is also limited by various conditions, and it is difficult to develop rapidly.
For a long time, although there was a system, Excel was still king, 90% of the reporting relied on manual statistics, and countless labor was consumed in data management, analysis and reporting, and these costs could not be invested in the business is a greater loss. Wu Bichuan said.
However, this also made Wu Bichuan see the infinite possibilities in hundreds of millions of data. In mid-2015, Wu Bichuan decided to take his team out of Baolong to start a business and establish Yueshang Technology, a company focusing on digital services for stock assets, in an attempt to change the management and operation of the industry with digitalization. This idea was strongly supported by Xu Huafang, the "young marshal" of Baolong Real Estate, and became an angel investor of Yueshang Technology.
With the acceleration of digitalization in various industries, digital shopping malls have also become the mainstream trend of business development. In 2018, Powerlong Commercial and Tencent launched the "Button Plan" to promote the company's overall intelligent transformation. One year after the launch of the plan, Powerlong Commercial and Tencent set up a joint venture to digitally build Baolong Commercial around the people, goods and yards through Tencent's cloud computing, WeChat payment, mini programs, AI, location services, IoT and other technical capabilities.
From 2016 to 2019, Powerlong Business can be said to have completed the first phase of digital construction, accumulating data from various businesses through the ERP system. However, the data is barely what to use. Wu Bichuan said, "Because of the traditional procurement management logic, the separation between systems is the norm, and it can be said that most enterprises have not benefited from the so-called data accumulation." This limitation is not only technical, but also the level of practitioners in the entire industry, the inertia of thinking, subject to the influence of many factors such as real estate, we silently accept the reality, but never give up the dream. ”
In recent years, it has also been a stage of rapid growth of Baolong Commercial's commercial operation management service business. According to the data, from 2016 to 2018, the rental and property management service income of Baolong Real Estate increased by % year-on-year. In 2019, Baolong Commercial was successfully listed, and the performance of its business management services increased by nearly 40%.
However, after the listing, Baolong Business is like standing in the spotlight, it needs to maintain high growth in performance, and it needs to continuously improve the efficiency of the ping and people. As a result, Powerlong Business's pursuit of digitalization has risen to a new level.
In the two years before and after the listing of Baolong Commercial, it was also a key stage for Yueshang Technology to polish its products, and after completing the new two rounds of financing and entering Tencent's ecosystem, Wu Bichuan put updating the team, iterating products, and focusing on AI in the first place. After the major update in 2019, the data of Baolong Business began to be fully and effectively managed, and when doing anything, "priority data precipitation" has become the core task of the team.
We can do AI mainly by relying on the effective data accumulated continuously over the past 19 years. Wu Bichuan said.
"Bet" on AI
At the beginning of 2020, the sudden epidemic pressed the pause button on commercial real estate.
The shutdown and changes of the epidemic have forced everyone to sit down and think about what kind of digitalization can really improve the efficiency of square footage and people, and achieve high-quality operations. In the end, we chose AI and content IP as our main directions. Wu Bichuan said.
At that time, Chen Deli had just joined the new Baolong Commercial and was fully responsible for the operation and management of Baolong Commercial. Chen Deli is a veteran of the commercial operation industry, known as the "business management magician", and he has the ultimate pursuit of "high-quality operation" and "smart business". Chen Deli once bluntly said in a public speech: In the past, the understanding of smart business was to give an accelerator to achieve online and offline integration, but the epidemic made Baolong Business realize that what business operations need is not an accelerator, but a smart engine. In Chen Deli's view, the revival of commercial real estate is inseparable from the wisdom engine and AI.
It is also with the strong support of Chen Deli that Baolong Commercial's AI path has become more determined, and he has been deeply involved in all major projects. "Deli is always our chief product experience officer", Wu Bichuan quipped, "such a high-level product officer our opponents can't afford to use." ”
After several years of unremitting efforts, Yueshang has accumulated more than 300 million pieces of data in various systems built by Baolong Commercial, and has built more than 1,500 derivative variables on it together with Tencent's security team, ranging from complex basic data, operational dynamic data, to process behavior, and even business operation, performance and behavior data of personnel. "The data structure we have accumulated is very complete, and these data can also play a role in their respective business modules, but there is still a key step to make full use of the data of the company as a whole. Wu Bichuan said.
In the field of business operation, where the data is fragmented and extremely large, and there seem to be standard rules but are affected by scenarios and people, the entire industry has reached a bottleneck by relying on the method of human + ERP to process data.
Therefore, in Yueshang's view, Baolong Business needs an algorithm model with AI capabilities, which can automatically process all data, automatically find conclusions, automatically imitate the behavior of employees to make judgments, and directly participate in the business process, rather than directly reducing the conversion rate of arrears, bad debt rate, human management time, etc., and the system needs to produce actions that directly affect performance.
In March 2023, a chance exchange between Powerlong Commercial and Tencent Tianyu team made a new breakthrough in Baolong Commercial's AI strategy: based on Tencent Tianyu's intelligent decision-making system PDOS, a new generation of AI-powered business operation system was created. Tencent Tianyu has more than 20 years of experience in risk control and confrontation in the black and gray industry, and the "financial-grade" AI decision-making ability to serve 80% of financial benchmark customers.
In fact, business operations and financial business are somewhat similar, and in general, they are repeated behaviors, but each business granularity is very different, which means that it is greatly affected by data, so AI can be used to analyze data. Wu Bichuan pointed out, "In fact, these data can be analyzed by employees, but people can't always maintain the overall management of data, and they can't analyze it 24/7." ”
For example, for example, a business with more than 100 projects will have about 300 million yuan in arrears, and this data is constantly rolling because merchants will continue to generate new arrears. These outstanding arrears are distributed among the operation teams of 100 projects, and then divided into multiple levels of projects to the regional to the headquarters, from the headquarters to the legal affairs to the decision-making level, and each arrears need a large number of personnel to approve and make decisions from occurrence to resolution.
According to reports, in this process, there will always be about 40 million to 50 million arrears to go to litigation, but it is too late to file a lawsuit, and finally half of them become bad debts. In this process, what the original system can do is provide reports, and then rely on people to analyze them.
Security should be "long" in the business system
With the help of Tencent Security, in the past three months, Baolong Commercial has built intelligent analysis and decision-making models such as store rating model and arrears control model based on Tencent Tianyu decision-making operating system. After the model was built, the data accumulated by Baolong Business for five years was "lived", and began to drive the formulation and application of decision-making in various operation scenarios.
Baolong has more than 140 projects, and we have to deal with nearly 40,000 merchants and related parties, and at the same time, the projects and shops are separated. In normal times, no matter how strong the analysis team is, no matter how good the system is, the most is to analyze and sort out the project as a whole, and then go into detail, the required manpower and material resources will increase at a geometric speed, and the gains outweigh the losses, so most of the operations are ultimately completely in the hands of the project team's 'artificial'. Wu Bichuan said, "But from the owner's point of view, every shop is an asset, need a detailed analysis, but in reality, no company can do this under the conditions of traditional tools, really to roll out step by step, hundreds of projects will require tens of thousands of people to do analysis, can not do, in reality, a project general manager intuition and experience, will play a key role - but this is not replicable." ”
AI is the icebreaker that changes the situation, a role that can tirelessly, 100% maintain level and quality, and conduct 360 degrees, 24 hours a day, 360 degrees of analysis and supervision of every square meter of assets. For example, in the scenario of arrears control, the AI-controlled system scans the arrears data by itself, automatically initiates all processes, notifies the business owner, supervises the closed-loop behavior for each arrears case, and calculates the time, cost, and risk points for each business link, providing key insights for the business owner. For example, there is no possibility of repayment of this arrears through communication, or judging by historical data and statistics, when should it enter the next link, and hand over the shop information to the investment promotion team in advance to reduce the rent loss. These comments can be taken in or discarded by the business, and no matter what kind of feedback is received, it will be added to the calculation parameters of the next submission.
The task of joining the AI system is not to simply reduce costs and increase efficiency, or even to eliminate employees, which was taken for granted before," Wu Bichuan reminded, "We really applied it and found that its greatest value is to learn Xi and summarize the processing strategies of excellent employees, and discover the people with the most business processing capabilities, the task of AI is to reduce their waste of time on management and process as much as possible, help them focus on the business, and scale up to the entire organization, the task of AI is to reduce the proportion of management costs to the limit. Increase the proportion of business investment. ”
This is a precision-engineered business AI that can be seamlessly integrated into the business on the basis of a huge amount of historical data, as a "no-use" system, it takes over the links that are not needed and should not be operated by humans in the first place—scanning, triggering, sending processes, controlling processes, organizing data, analyzing them, exposing problems, providing solutions, and so on.
In Baolong, with the blessing of AI, the operation system can push forward all nodes that deal with arrears by 2-3 months, thereby greatly reducing the bad debt rate. "In the past, basically, when a store was irretrievable, the investment promotion department knew that it was going to attract investment, but now through AI prediction and intervention, the time occupied by people in system and process management has been reduced to less than 15% -20%, which can help employees save 80% of their energy and allow them to focus more on their core business. ”
In October, the first phase of the AI module began to run in the pilot project of Baolong Commercial (of course, it actually includes the full amount of data), and almost at the moment of launch, the system automatically launched dozens of missed, Further, a set of lists were sent to the pilot project team, listing the targets that may be in arrears or dropped in the next 3 months, and even put forward the stores that believe that there are false elements in the sales data through data comparison (sales management has always been a core problem in the industry, and the AI model can compare the data with 'incomplete' statistics to find the goals with abnormal deviations). Since the general manager of the pilot project is a relatively experienced practitioner, their feelings after watching it are: similar to what we thought.
The reaction of Chen and the management when they saw the results was the same: it was basically accurate.
This means that our model can reach the middle to upper level of judgment of the project leader. "Now imagine that this is the bottom line level of business management, and it will continue to improve." ”
In Wu Bichuan's view, such AI is the system of the future, and all industries and fields have the need for risk control in business, business and security are naturally integrated, and security should also be in the business system. Only when the business is secure enough can the business be feasible to operate and execute, and it has the meaning of existence.
Therefore, the same is true for business operations, only by compressing the risk factors into a predictable range, then the business will be safe. Because organizationally, having a dynamic and effective response capability to any situation is a guarantee that AI risk control or security capabilities need to create," Wu Bichuan told Leifeng.
Leifeng.com.