Shen Yiran, a reporter from the Economic Observer Network.The reporter learned from the inside of Shangtang Technology that Xu Li, co-founder of Shangtang Technology and CEO, sent an email to all employees on November 23, containing a copy of the General outline of SenseTime Group's second five-year Plan (2021-2025) (hereinafter referred to as "Planning"). According to the Plan, this is the first time in the history of the company to formulate a medium-and long-term development plan with a span of five years, and it is also the first time that a strategic plan has been rolled out in an all-round way.

Xu Li said in an email that the "plan" was officially finalized eight months after the start of construction in August 2020, and was officially launched in August this year. The consensus formed by the "Planning" will guide the flow of internal and external resources of the company, which is an important basis for departments to customize their annual work plans in the future, and is also bound to the company's target resources.

The Plan sets two goals: first, to form a stable and sustainable profitability and a balanced and healthy business structure; and second, to become an international leading provider of artificial intelligence solutions and technical services to promote social AI transformation.

As for the industry trend, the "Planning" said that it is optimistic about the future of the industry, but the information industry and Internet giants continue to put more emphasis on the field of AI, and many leading enterprises in traditional industries also choose to build their own capabilities, and the market pattern will be further complicated in the coming period of time.

How to develop business in a balanced way

From the company's point of view, one of the five-year goals is to form a stable and sustainable profitability and a balanced and healthy business structure.

The company wants to build a "one platform, four pillars" business structure, a platform is named SenseCore general artificial intelligence infrastructure, also known as "AI device". The four pillars are to divide all landing scenes into four business segments, smart business, smart city, smart life, and smart car.

At present, the development between the four sectors is uneven. As of the first half of 2021, smart business (39.2%) and smart city (47.6%) accounted for a large proportion of the income structure, while smart life (8.9%) and smart car (4.3%) accounted for a smaller proportion, according to the prospectus.

The company has put forward different plans for the four sectors. Smart business and smart city, mainly do ToB enterprise business, and ToG city management business, the latter is Shang Tang advantage, is conducive to drive the former business.

Smart living business, which is different from the consumer business outside the government and enterprises, includes two business models: indirect ToBToC and direct ToC. Considering the natural extension trend of the company's past experience and ability, it will focus on developing ToBToC business in the next five years.

The Group takes smart cars as the focus of investment, and is currently building the Shadow platform as the core application platform, which includes intelligent and assisted driving, intelligent cabin applications, driverless minibuses, vehicle-road coordination and other technology. the company plans to gradually open the platform internally and externally (depot).

Why do you want to do AI technology platform? how to do it?

With the deep integration of artificial intelligence and many industries, customers' demand for computing power has increased by several million times. From the perspective of the scenario, AI enterprises have developed their head requirements deeply, such as AI security. AI enterprises need to seek new business growth points after sharing the dividends of these industries.

A Shantang science and technology personage said to the reporter, different from doing intelligent security before, AI develops to the present stage, encounters a lot of new scene demand is long tail, fine differentiation, the frequency of use is low, but the request to the technology is not low, so the process of commercialization takes time. The competition among AI technology providers is to shorten time and improve production efficiency. Externally, we should provide models to customers at a faster speed, train algorithms faster, and internally, we should copy and share the technology in all business lines at a faster speed. This is also a meaning of creating a "AI device".

According to the Plan, the current "AI device" includes data platform, AI chip, intelligent processing card, AI computing center, AI training platform and AI model factory. In 2021, the company launched a series of platform capacity building, including training chips and training platforms, as well as general algorithm capabilities, reasoning chips, general cloud framework, data platform, talent reserve and development. At the same time, four forward-looking construction studies have been arranged, including digital entertainment, production-city integration, great health, and carbon neutrality.