On the 25th of October, the 2019 China Catering Supply Chain Conference was held in Beijing. About 1000 representatives from the head enterprises and universities discuss the current situation of the catering supply chain in the new era, the opportunities for development and the upgrade direction of future innovation. WeBank’s AI group is a representative of the implementation of AI applications to solve the pain points from the fresh-food retail industry. In the conference, senior researcher Minghua Zheng shared the idea of “AI Selling prediction” and “insight system of business opportunities”. WeBank will introduce financial AI into the entity economy with Mei Cai, the conference organizer, to jointly improve the current situation of the fresh-food retail industry.

 

WeBank, Senior Researcher, Minghua Zheng shared his view in the conference

In recent years, the fresh-food industry has been developed rapidly. But it comes up with more problems. The fresh-food product has a lot of pain points such as short shelf life, the difficulty of cold chain distribution and non-standard. The warehousing and distribution of fresh-food will be a challenge for the fresh-food industry. In the conference, the senior researcher from WeBank’s AI group, Minghua Zheng introduced that focusing on the issues of goods high consumption, difficulty in control of preparing goods, WeBank and Mei Cai jointly establish the AI prediction model based on federated learning technology. Based on protecting the security of data privacy, it can analyze according to the history sales record, customer profile insight of each region, climate change, news and current events. It also optimizes the whole category planning to reduce the operation cost by forecasting the sales volume accurately in hours level, which helps to improve the user compliance rate. Besides, both parties will base on the industry and launch the “Business opportunity insight system”. By business associated with multiple dimensional data to conduct the visualization analysis, it can quickly have the market trends, digging the potential business opportunities to help make an efficient and accurate digital operation decision.

It is known that except for the sales volume and Business opportunity insight system, both parties are still focused on intelligence warehouse – conduct the AI perspective data and visualization analysis according to the distance to the business district, high-speed intersection, wholesale market, evaluating automatically the traffic, the quality of environment, completing the decision like: site selection of intelligence warehouse, assisting to set up a warehouse, moving a warehouse. In the future, both parties will keep on promoting the technology innovation of the fresh-food supply chain industry. They will establish a promotion platform based on the automatic machine learning model, for continuous optimization of the sales volume forecast. It promotes deep research in the fields of intelligence pricing and intelligence customer service system.

Industrial chain upgrading is the common topic of fresh-food and catering industries. Only relying on AI for the digital upgrade that we can use the platform data flexibly to help develop industries again. Facing the huge trend of intelligent fresh-food and catering industries, the WeBank AI group will further implement the AI technology and intelligence system with more institutions and industries to create new scenarios of catering and retail industries, providing the strong power for real economy development.