When a user sends questions to the WeChat account of China Merchants Bank, for example, it will bring up an AI chatbot called “Little Zhao”, which is able to answer basic inquiries.
So far, Xiao-I has served more than 1,000 business clients across over 50 industries, mostly based in mainland China, Yuan said. They include the country’s three major telecoms network operators, its largest commercial banks, and Big Tech companies such as JD.com and Huawei Technologies.
In 2021, Xiao-I generated US$32.5 million in revenue, up nearly 135 per cent from 2020, according to its IPO prospectus. It managed to turn a US$3.4 million profit, after recording a net loss of US$7.1 million the previous year.
Xiao-I is backed by Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
After US start-up OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm late last year, Xiao-I plans to further expand its foothold in the enterprise market, according to Yuan. He said the firm will also explore new opportunities in the consumer market.
The company last year quadrupled its research and development budget to US$24 million from 2021, but posted a loss even though its revenue rose 48 per cent to a record high of US$48.2 million.
Yuan said he was frequently asked by investors about ChatGPT during the company’s IPO road show.
“In the past 10 or 20 years, when we spoke about AI, we were talking about applications in certain vertical industries, which were carried out gradually on a small scale,” he said.
“But with the support of large [language] models, people now see that AI has the ability to generalise – meaning we will soon enter a stage where the technology can be adopted by hundreds or thousands of industries at the same time.”