Talks of smart city and digital city dominated the proceedings on the first day of the fourth World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

Robin Li Chairman and CEO of Baidu

IN the past, talks about AI were centered on its commercial value such as economic development efficiency and also security, but now it’s time to realize that AI has many social values for improving people’s life quality.

For example, in smart transportation with intelligent vehicles and smart roads, its commercial value is that it can improve traffic efficiency by 15 percent, which boosts GDP by 24 percent.

But its social value is also significant, which can empower safer and greener travel, reduce the traffic accident rate and reduce carbon emissions.

Each year, globally, there are 51 billion tons of carbon emissions with transportation contributing a huge 16 percent.

Ken Hu Rotating chairman of Huawei

At the WAIC exhibition, I noticed two features. One is that there are few dazzling and cool AI technologies or products on show. The other is, more core technologies are on show. Most of the exhibits are not novel to us and can be seen in daily life, which means AI was tangible in the past and now it has become pervasive around us and even invisible to some extent.

Most people who live in Shanghai have used Shanghai’s citizen hotline — 12345 — one or more times. The hotline is very helpful and efficient, to be honest.

Each month it has more than 600,000 citizens sending in their views, almost 20 per minute. The secret of its efficiency is the application of AI.

Zhou Hongyi CEO of 360

Digital city is the core scenario of digitalization. Digital city means comprehensive urban digital transformation, using digital technologies to drive, empower and reshape our cities. The core of a digital city is to produce, collect and empower the big data. Digital city is a software-defined city in fact, which means the deeper the digitalization, the bigger the challenge for us. So data security is more important than ever.