Accelerating Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence for a Leap in Productivity

Speaking at Huawei's Industrial Digital and Intelligent Transformation Summit at GITEX 2024 in Dubai, Leo Chen, Huawei's corporate senior vice president, President of Enterprise Sales, felt it was the perfect time and place to discuss the future of intelligence.

The location was ideal because Dubai is a city full of innovative and bold projects that showcase the boldness and creativity inherent in the human spirit.

And timing wise, the approaching productivity revolution is being powered by the latest innovations brought about by the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Each of the three great Industrial Revolutions of the past 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 mechanised production. During the second, we achieved mass production. And during the third, we achieved automated production.

Now, the fourth Industrial Revolution 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 realise the full potential of digital and intelligent productivity, three main challenges have been identified that are holding back digital and AI adoption.

First, digital and intelligent infrastructures need 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%.

Ecosystem, talent, and policy gaps are also significant 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,” said Chen. "Three directions are essential to this task:

• The first is to build a powerful infrastructure.
• The second is to apply the latest technologies to 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 and the more pragmatic mainstream market.
• The third is fostering a thriving innovation ecosystem so everyone can benefit from digital and intelligent transformation."

He stated that Huawei believes it can leverage its unique capabilities and contribute in five key areas.

The first is to build AI-ready infrastructure that allows data to be effectively collected, transmitted, processed, and computed in real time and 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 the unique ability to comprehensively support industries in buildings such infrastructure.

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 first 800GE AI router, and the first all-optical data center switch, and constantly set new industry benchmarks.

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

In addition, to meet the needs of general and intelligent computing power, Huawei has developed two solutions: Kunpeng for general-purpose computing and Ascend for AI computing. These two ecosystems are open to partners, along with developed foundational hardware, software, industry applications, and development toolkits.

Cloudification is imperative in the AI era. Huawei Cloud Stack, comprising cloud-infrastructure datacentre 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 localised data protection.

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

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

Using this architecture, Huawei has developed over 200 industry solutions and defined four 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, partners are helped to develop their own applications for multiple types of cloud in a single step, shortening development times from months to weeks.

Third is data enablement. Huawei's data lakehouse solution breaks down data silos, reduces data fragmentation, and cuts data migration workloads by 80%.

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 more than a thousand industry scenarios.

UnionBank in the Philippines is a good example. Huawei helped the bank construct an integrated network for its branches and datacentres. It can now launch new connections in minutes. The bank also used Huawei's cloud platform enablement to launch its digital loan system at a record-breaking speed of just 35 days.

Based on 100 cases like this, Huawei has written a whitepaper for customers to reference during their transformation journeys.

The third area the company is focusing on is building an efficient "Huawei plus Partner" cooperation system.

No one party should be able to seize the new opportunities presented by the latest technological developments and achieve great things alone. So, Huawei has introduced the "SHAPE" framework, which outlines the five directions in which we will focus efforts to shape a win-win future with our partners, including:

1. Sustaining the leadership of products and solutions
2. Honing joint innovation with partners
3. Advancing partner capability development
4. Promoting partner cooperation experience
5. And expanding partner growth opportunities.

Another crucial component of ecosystems is talent.

Statistics show that the world currently has a talent gap of 60 million people in terms of digital and intelligent technologies, which is only set to increase.

Huawei is working to address this issue by providing tech-based, practice-oriented enablement training. With over 30 years of technical know-how and ICT project experience, the company is developing and constantly optimising 3,000 courses that cover 22 technical categories. It also provides operating environments, such as online labs, to help trainees master the latest technologies by combining theory with practice.

Huawei runs programmes at the enterprise, university, and individual levels. These programmes have already cultivated more than 8 million ICT professionals, but that's just the start. The current target is to nurture over 10 million new tech professionals by 2030.