New wealth opportunities for ordinary people?
Text: Liu Yiqi.
Edited by Yawen Zheng.
Late at night, Huang Xuefeng's company was empty, and in the dark office, there was a corner with six computers lit up. The six computers seem to be controlled by a pair of invisible hands, and the cursor of the mouse moves quickly across the screen, jumping to new pages from time to time.
In 2023, Huang Xuefeng's company's biggest gain is this pair of "invisible hands". He bought 5 RPA (Machine ** Process Automation) accounts, which can simulate various human operations, and perform automatic operations such as mouse clicks, keyboard input, and reading information on any application.
Relying on RPA technology, Huang Xuefeng's company's manpower has been reduced by half, and dozens of cross-border e-commerce stores have been opened at the same time.
Shadow Knife has built-in three AI functions in the RPA software: NLP, large model, and CV, and those who can use RPA software proficiently will have a salary level thousands of yuan higher than that of ordinary operators in the job market.
AI Yanzi Sun on station B).
2023 is known as the "first year of AI". At the beginning of the year, the whole people were hotly discussing ChatGPT, and then, "AI Yanzi Sun" became popular all over the Internet, and major companies entered the game one after another. Alibaba Cloud launched "Tongyi Qianwen", which became popular abroad at the end of the year by relying on a **generation dance**; Launched "Wenxin Yiyan", with more than 100 million users; ByteDance launched its chatbot "Coze" overseas.
This technology, which once had a sense of barrier and distance, has permeated the lives of the public. In the business field, e-commerce merchants are also relying on AI to complete their transformation.
Huang Xuefeng's company has a special section. There are 6 computers there, but only one chair. An employee sits in an office chair and slides around in front of the computer, and he only needs to manage the six computers once in a while.
Those 6 computers are also my employees, and they work 24 hours a day. Huang Xuefeng said.
Huang Xuefeng has been working in the cross-border e-commerce industry for nearly 14 years. The stunned young man who was once poor and white can grow into an e-commerce veteran who is in charge of a company with annual sales of hundreds of millions of yuan, in addition to the sensitivity of the market, he must also have the courage to transform quickly. There are two of the most disruptive transformations of his company, one is to build its own SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) and expand its categories; The other time is to "recruit" AI employees in 2023.
Huang Xuefeng Company).
Before 2020, Huang Xuefeng was doing the same traditional e-commerce business as other sellers on AliExpress, Alibaba's cross-border platform, and his main product was cameras. Huang Xuefeng and his wife manage the factory at the back end and produce goods; On the other hand, it operates stores at the front end to serve overseas buyers. The company has about 70 employees and a total of 4 stores.
During the epidemic, affected by the control of overseas chips in China, the store once fell into a trough. Finding a source of goods, expanding categories, and opening new stores became his lifesaver at that time.
According to Huang Xuefeng's past business experience, it usually takes about 3 months to open a new store. In the past, there was only one main store manager in a store, called the "store manager model", and the store manager needed to cooperate with various departments, such as obtaining **, he had to communicate with the design department for details, and all the trivial things added up to the efficiency was not high.
In order to speed up the opening of the store, he changed the "store manager model", but split the various links of store opening and store operation to establish a set of SOPs, "each link is refined to which software needs to be opened and which places to click the mouse". New employees only need to get started from onboarding, and it only takes 3 hours at the earliest. A 60-year-old aunt in the warehouse can pack 150-180 packages in an hour under the guidance of an effective process, which is 15 times higher wages.
During the first transformation of Huang Xuefeng's company, the AI industry is also undergoing great changes. Cambrian, the "first share of AI chips", officially landed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and the opening price rose 288 on the first day of listing26%；The market value of iFLYTEK, which focuses on intelligent voice input in China, has also exceeded 100 billion yuan; Domestic artificial intelligence companies focusing on computer vision, such as Questyle Technology, SenseTime, and YITU Technology, are also ushering in a listing boom.
At that time, Huang Xuefeng was busy running factories all day long, looking for supplies, and the number of the company's stores increased to 70 in just 2 years, covering many categories such as home furnishing, beauty, sports and outdoor, auto parts, etc., and the number of company personnel increased to 100 people.
While SOP brings efficiency to the company, it also makes Huang Xuefeng aware of the drawbacks. "On the one hand, employees have a lot of repetitive work, which leads to a high turnover rate in the company; On the other hand, as the number of stores increases, the cost of personnel also increases. ”
Taking the financial position as an example, the company needs to take out the money in the store background every two days, from the US dollar to the first famous currency, the financial staff need to log in to the account, click on the background, withdraw the amount, exchange currency, etc. 60 stores, 60 times to repeat the operation, this is an extremely standardized and boring process.
In November 2022, by chance, Huang Xuefeng learned about RPA technology. RPA technology, also known as machine automation, can simulate human beings and perform automated operations such as mouse clicks, keyboard input, and reading information on any application.
To use RPA in e-commerce scenarios, you must first purchase the manufacturer's software account and recruit relevant technical personnel. The annual cost of an account is much lower than the annual cost of a basic employee. "Give it a try! After learning about the technology, Huang Xuefeng almost did not hesitate and bought 5 accounts in one go.
In recent years, there are many companies in China that have deployed RPA technology, and these companies have made software robot applications based on RPA technology, which can manipulate applications on the interface like humans. The stability of the program** can also reduce the error rate caused by human operation.
Under the recommendation of his younger brother, Huang Xuefeng tried the Shadow Knife RPA software. Open the background, operators can build a set of automation applications by dragging and dropping like building blocks, so as to realize the automation of services such as "data collection, form filling, automatic reply, financial and tax invoicing".
Bottle Bottle, an employee of Shadow Knife, told us that in some large-scale e-commerce companies, RPA software has become an indispensable office assistant. In addition to retail e-commerce brands such as "Aokang", "Semir", "Blue Moon" and "Anta", which use RPA to simplify office processes, they also include MCN companies such as Xinxuan Group and Yuanwang Technology.
In order to facilitate non-developers to quickly get started with RPA programs, Shadow Knife has also launched relevant learning courses and established a complete RPA certification system. "As far as we know, in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other regions, this kind of certificate is still relatively well recognized in the recruitment market, and the average salary of operators with a certificate of completion is about 2,000 yuan higher than that of ordinary employees without a certificate. "In recent years, Shadow Knife has provided virtual workforce to more than 30,000 companies. In 2023, the number of people looking for bottle inquiries increased by as much as 5 times compared to 2022.
The secondary engineering of the Shadow Knife mainstream large-scale model technology, and the launch of the Shadow Knife AI series of functions and products. In 2023, Shadow Knife achieved 100% contrarian growth in an uncertain environment.
And Huang Xuefeng, who used RPA software, also ushered in a turning point for the company.
He split the SOP process into 20 to 30 nodes per workflow on average. If it is judged to be a standardized job that can be replaced by a robot, a business process is established in the RPA software. Under the operation of the software, a financial currency withdrawal and exchange work that could have taken more than 6 hours to complete was compressed to only 2-3 hours.
After recruiting "AI employees, the work that used to take 40 operations to complete was reduced to 20 employees. The most intuitive changes brought to the company also include the speed of opening stores. In the case of downsizing, the company's store opening speed is twice as fast. Today, the number of stores in Huang Xuefeng's company has reached 120.
For Huang Xuefeng, the number of stores can increase sales, and reviews can bring repurchase rates. AI employees can identify whether background reviews are risky and whether they will generate negative information about the store, and according to different situations, they can realize the after-sales processing mode of thousands of people.
Huang Xuefeng's imagination of AI is not limited to this, "In the future, I hope to use AI to form a database and build the company's AI model."
In addition to using RPA technology, last year, merchants also tried various possibilities under the AI outlet.
When he managed the ** casually and harvested the first order, Zhang Xin was a little incredible. His main job is a programmer, and because of his work, Zhang Xin has a certain understanding of AI-related operation processes. Since the beginning of last year, he has been working on the AI drawing tool Midjourney, an artificial intelligence painting program that generates images from text. The tool can generate different styles of ** according to the dialogue instructions.
In order to satisfy his curiosity, Zhang Xin made a set of artistic photos for his children. He still remembers that when he first started using the tool, he uploaded a relatively vague sample map, and the result was that in the ** given by Midjourney, the similarity deviation was relatively large, and the child had 6 fingers. With the continuous optimization and addition of instruction information, the resulting graph is slowly approaching the demand. The generated **rough look like a real shot**, and if you look closely, you can find the rough edge at the subtle details, which is closer to oil painting in style.
A group of **of** is less than 30 yuan, and the character can also switch to different scenes, and when he put the picture he generated on the Internet, there were a large number of orders from the Bao Ma group. Because of the high cost performance, the speed of picture production is fast, the most month, the store has sold 1500 orders, "mothers prefer to post moments, and the baby's AI art photos are very novel to them."
After AI became popular, a large number of posts appeared on the Internet "Teach you how to operate AI to make money", **from 8Ranging from $8 to $888. Zhang Xin said: "Most of the tool-related content can be self-taught by searching for free materials on the Internet. "Whether you can get money by buying their courses is another matter, selling courses does make some people make a lot of money.
In his opinion, the business related to AI image generation is technically mature and easy for ordinary people to get started, and the most difficult thing is not to learn tools through courses, but to find new needs.
In less than half a year after starting the business, there have been many competitors in the baby art business. In order to find new growth in the store. Zhang Xin has launched several new products one after another, such as old **coloring restoration, real **customized** avatars, etc. However, as more and more people join the track, the speed of customer acquisition of the new model becomes very limited.
In the new year, the wind of AI is bound to continue to blow. Aside from the market foam, the follow-up, the real demand, the landing scene, and the long-term benefits will become more concerned by entrepreneurs.