When Yuan Hui launched his company’s first chatbot two decades ago, the world had yet to catch up on the potential of conversational artificial intelligence .
As a marketing employee at the US tech giant, Yuan attended a conference in Atlanta, where he heard the billionaire entrepreneur speak. Inspired by Gates’ experience, Yuan quit his job a year later and founded Xiao-I in 2001. But there was one problem: The company had trouble finding a way to earn money from its technology. Consumers were happy to use its chatbot for free, but if they had to pay for it, Xiao-I would need to come up with something much better.
“We started with the call centre business because it was a service that was widely offered by various industries,” Yuan said. The company began with telecommunications network operators, expanded to banks and securities firms, and eventually sold its products to government agencies and e-commerce companies.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.