Accelerating Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence for a Leap in Productivity

Keynote Speech at Huawei’s Industrial Digital and Intelligent Transformation Summit at GITEX 2024

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!

Welcome to Huawei’s Industrial Digital and Intelligent Transformation Summit at GITEX 2024.

It is a pleasure to meet with many friends from around the world here in Dubai. I believe this is the perfect time and place to discuss the future of intelligence. In terms of the place – Dubai is a city full of innovative and bold projects that showcase the boldness and creativity inherent in the human spirit. As for the time – we are approaching a productivity revolution, powered by the latest innovations and brought about by the 4th Industrial Revolution.

We all know the three great industrial revolutions of the past. Each was driven by innovation in general-purpose technologies. The result was increased productivity, and social and economic progress.

During the First Industrial Revolution, we achieved mechanized production. During the Second, we achieved mass production. And during the Third, we achieved automated production.

Now, the Fourth is here, thanks to AI, 5G-A, cloud, and other technologies. Automated production is becoming smarter. And the physical world is merging with the digital world. This trend will profoundly impact the economic performance of every country and industry. Data shows that the digital economy is already a major engine of global economic growth, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.2%.

However, as we seek to realize the full potential of digital and intelligent productivity, we have found 3 main types of challenges that are holding back digital and AI adoption.

First, digital and intelligent infrastructure needs a more solid foundation. Currently, less than 50% of devices are connected. And computing is unaffordable, energy-intensive, and in short supply.

The sheer number of industry scenarios and AI hallucinations is keeping AI penetration below 12%.

And ecosystem, talent, and policy gaps are also big challenges.

To overcome these challenges and seize new opportunities, we must work together and build a more equitable future, where no one is left behind. Three directions are essential to this task:

The first, is to build powerful infrastructure;

The second is to apply the latest technologies to the industrial scenarios, so that industrial customers can more easily cross the digital "chasm " and make the latest technologies, such as AI, more adoptable by a broader user base across industries, as well as the more pragmatic mainstream market;

The third is to foster a thriving innovation ecosystem, so that everyone can benefit from digital and intelligent transformation.

Huawei believes we can leverage our unique capabilities and contribute in 5 key areas.

The first area is to build AI-ready infrastructure that allows data to be effectively collected, transmitted, processed, and computed in real time and be transformed into productivity, laying the foundation for digital and intelligent transformation.

In this regard, Huawei's full-stack technical capabilities in network, storage, computing, and cloud give us the unique ability to comprehensively support industries in building such infrastructure.

First, sufficient, high-quality data is the basis for AI inference and computation. Therefore, AI-ready infrastructure requires sufficient transport capacity to support real-time, high-speed, and lossless data transmission from devices to the cloud, including over campus networks, wide area networks (WANs), and data centre networks. To realize this requirement, Huawei has launched a series of products, including the industry's highest-performance Wi-Fi 7, the industry's first 800GE AI router, and the industry's first all-optical data center switch, and constantly sets new industry benchmarks.

Robust storage capacity that supports efficient data storage and retrieval is also key to AI-Ready digital and intelligent infrastructure. Therefore, Huawei launched next-generation, AI-Ready, all-flash storage products, which can not only store more data, but retrieve and recover data faster than other comparable storage products.

In addition, to meet the needs of general and intelligent computing power, we have developed two solutions: Kunpeng for general-purpose computing, and Ascend for AI computing. These two ecosystems are open to our partners, and we've developed foundational hardware, software, industry applications, and development toolkits alongside our partners. With these solutions, we want to provide the world with better choices.

Finally, cloudification is imperative in the AI era. Huawei Cloud Stack, our cloud-infrastructure data-centre solutions that can be deployed on an enterprise’s premises, provides the same performance and service experience as the public cloud, while meeting the needs of localized data protection.

The second area in which Huawei can help industrial customers is offering reference models based on our deep understanding of industries' scenarios.

In this regard, in order to provide various industries with reference models on how to achieve successful intelligent transformation as they build their ICT architecture, Huawei has proposed a 6-layer "reference architecture" This can guide our partners towards more convenient and efficient innovation.

Using this architecture, we have developed over 200 industry solutions. We have also defined 4 implementation models for going digital and intelligent.

The first is for ICT infrastructure enablement. By integrating computing, networks, and storage, we can build resilient ICT infrastructure that delivers: zero service interruptions, zero-waiting experience, zero-touch O&M, and, zero-trust security.

The second model is cloud platform enablement. Here, we help partners develop their own applications for multiple types of cloud in a single go. This shortens development times from months to weeks.

Third, we have data enablement. Our data lakehouse solution breaks down data silos, reduces data fragmentation, and cuts data migration workloads by 80%.

Finally, Huawei provides AI enablement through AI capability frameworks and tools. They enable a wide variety of models and accelerate application in real-world scenarios. This enablement model has already been used in over one thousand industry scenarios.

UnionBank in the Philippines is a good example of how to use these models. We helped them construct an integrated network for its branches and data centers. They can now launch new connections in just minutes. The bank also used our cloud platform enablement to launch its digital loan system at a record-breaking speed, in just 35 days.

Based on 100 cases like this, we have also written a white paper for our customers to reference during their transformation journeys.

The third area we focus on is to build an efficient "Huawei plus Partner" cooperation system. We are keenly aware that no one party can seize the new opportunities presented by the latest technological developments, and achieve great things alone. So, we have introduced the "SHAPE" framework, including:

Sustaining the leadership of products and solutions,

Honing joint innovation with partners,

Advancing partner capability development,

Promoting partner cooperation experience,

And, expanding partner growth opportunities,

Here, I would also like to reaffirm our partner principles of ‘shared benefits as the bridge, integrity as the foundation, and rules as the guarantee’.

By building an efficient "Huawei plus Partner" cooperation system, we believe we can succeed together in the intelligent era!

Another crucial component of ecosystems is talent. Statistics show that the world currently has a 60-million-person talent gap regarding digital and intelligent technologies, and this is only set to increase.

Huawei is working to address this issue by providing tech-based, practice-oriented enablement training. Huawei has 30 years of technical know-how and ICT project experience. We are developing and constantly optimizing 3 thousand courses that cover 22 technical categories. We also provide operating environments, like online labs, to help trainees master the latest technologies by combining theory with practice.

We run programs at the enterprise, university, and individual levels. These programs have already cultivated over 8 million ICT professionals, but that's just the start. Our current target is to nurture over 10 million new tech professionals by 2030.

Finally, government support in policies will be crucial to successful digital and intelligent transformation. On the back of this, governments, the ICT industry, and society as a whole would benefit greatly from an index that measures and evaluates ICT ROI, as well as the level of ICT development and maturity of ICT ecosystems.

Huawei started looking into these areas in 2014, which led to the Global Connectivity Index, or GCI. The GCI quantified the value of connectivity and its impact on the digital economy.

But, we wanted to measure the impact of digital transformation on an even greater scale, resulting in the new Global Digitalization Index, or GDI, that we created with IDC.

The GDI measures the maturity of a country's ICT industry by factoring in more indicators for digital infrastructure, including computing, storage, cloud, and green energy. The research found that a one-US-dollar investment in digital transformation results in an 8.3-US-dollar return in a country's digital economy.

Our hope is that the GDI will give every country a clearer vision of and plan for its digital and intelligent transformation.

Ladies and gentlemen,

After discussing what we can do regarding digital and intelligent transformation, I couldn't help but once again consider what I mentioned about the city in which we are gathered being a place that inspires the innovation and boldness within the human spirit.

As the saying goes, "Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it”. The quality of boldness is exactly what we want to share and encourage through this Summit as we showcase Huawei's latest innovations, technologies, and more.

By upholding this spirit, I believe we can ride the magnificent wave of digital transformation and succeed together. Thank you all!