For EZVIZ Network, which is known as the "first share of smart home", an AI revolution for both C-end users and B-end customers is in full swing.
On June 27, the 2024 ECDC EZVIZ Cloud Developer Conference with the theme of "AI Reaches All Industries and Sees the Direction" was held in Hangzhou. At the meeting, EZVIZ brought its self-developed embodied intelligent large model, a new generation architecture with AI as the core, and new capabilities for full-stack development of cloud services. EZVIZ cloud positioning has also been upgraded simultaneously, from "the industry's leading video Internet of Things cloud platform" to "the world's leading visual Internet of Things cloud platform".
In addition to upgrading cloud platform services, EZVIZ's AI layout on smart home terminal products has also been rolled out. At the 2024 EZVIZ Spring New Product Launch Conference held at the end of March, EZVIZ released a number of new terminal products such as the video call camera S10, the AI three-camera automatic face video lock DL60FVXPro and the home assistant robot RK3 with terminal + cloud + AI as the core three elements.
It can be seen that under the wave of "AI+", EZVIZ, a company that has already had a strong technical core in the field of AI, has made all preparations to help thousands of industries to welcome the arrival of the new era of AI.
Big upgrade: from video to visual
EZVIZ, which is independent from Hikvision, has been committed to becoming a reliable smart home service provider and Internet of Things cloud platform provider since its establishment, and has developed a dual main business model of "smart home + Internet of Things cloud platform" based on the cloud platform, and established the core position of the cloud platform in its business model. Among them, the former is mainly engaged in the R&D and sales of hardware equipment such as smart home cameras, smart locks, and smart robots, while the latter is a full-stack open PaaS cloud platform service.
According to the 2023 annual report released by EZVIZ, the revenue of EZVIZ Network's smart home products in 2023 will be 3.96 billion yuan, accounting for about 82.22% of the company's main business income; Revenue increased by 10.09% year-on-year in 2022. The revenue of the Internet of Things cloud platform was 856 million yuan, accounting for 17.78% of the company's main business income; The revenue increased by 27.79% year-on-year in 2022.
Although the main revenue is still in the sales of hardware products, it is not difficult to see that EZVIZ is also working hard to increase the proportion of cloud platform business in total revenue, which is also one of the more imaginative segments of the business.
According to the annual report data, by the end of 2023, the number of devices connected on the EZVIZ network IoT cloud platform will exceed 254 million, including more than 200 million video devices. The number of registered users of the "EZVIZ Cloud Video" application is 157 million, and the number of monthly active users is 54.46 million.
A remarkable fact is that in the past two years, AI interactive large model technology has developed rapidly, from text to audio and video to multimodality, of which audio and video are the main technology of perception and interaction.
In the face of this change, EZVIZ, which focuses on the application exploration of audio and video scenarios, also continues to improve the componentization capabilities of the cloud platform on the basis of the full-stack open PaaS IoT cloud platform services, and co-creates with developers and customers with AI capabilities and audio and video capabilities as the core, helping thousands of industries to innovate and upgrade intelligently.
The leap from video to vision is the "report card" handed over by EZVIZ. Focusing on space-level embodied intelligence, EZVIZ has independently developed a "blue ocean model" for Internet of Things scenarios, and its accumulated massive AI capabilities, in addition to being applied in its own smart home industry, will also be further opened to industry developers.
For example, for atomic algorithms, EZVIZ provides 29 categories and 93 sub-categories of capabilities, which are the basic capabilities of AI developers to "walk the rivers and lakes" or "must-have at home", covering AI tools from basic data governance tools to model deployment, which can be directly called and used. The device-cloud collaboration algorithm capabilities provided by EZVIZ include 73 basic perception algorithms, covering text, audio, image and video, such as face recognition, humanoid detection, OCR, etc., which can be directly called and used. For interactive or generative algorithms, EZVIZ also provides 26 capabilities, covering language interaction, image generation, multimodal interaction, and a variety of embodied proxy services.
Bo Faqiang, general manager of the government and enterprise affairs department of EZVIZ Network, introduced on the spot that at present, EZVIZ Cloud has excellent developer partners in many fields such as smart home, chain commerce, smart construction site and transparent home decoration, medical care and elderly care, entertainment and competition, etc., and has jointly landed a wealth of visual applications. By the end of 2023, EZVIZ Cloud Platform has more than 310,000 developer customers. From video to vision, EZVIZ integrates AI technology to fully open up the growth space of cloud business.
Start again: Help thousands of industries usher in the new era of AI
If before 2023, the national policy was mainly to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence technology and encourage the development of artificial intelligence in various application fields, then from 2023, the concept of self-generative AI will be introduced, and the state will begin to comprehensively encourage and support the innovative application of generative AI in various industries and fields.
A new era of AI is in full swing. According to the recently released "Digital China Development Report (2023)", in 2023, the scale of the mainland's digital economy will exceed 55 trillion yuan, and the added value of the core industries of the digital economy will account for 10% of GDP. In addition, according to a report released by CCID Think Tank, the scale of the mainland's artificial intelligence core industry will reach 500 billion yuan in 2023, and it is expected to exceed 799.3 billion yuan in 2024.
For EZVIZ, in the context of the digital economy, there are more and more scenarios of "decentralized operation and centralized management", their number is large but relatively scattered, there is a certain demand for vision, and even the integration of software and hardware is required, and these are opportunities for EZVIZ. "There are 1 million bubble tea shops, 600,000 smart construction sites, 320,000 home improvement sites, 320,000 convenience stores, 200,000 billiard rooms, 90,000 smart hotels, and 235,000 home-based elderly care beds across the country, all of which need to be digitized and intelligent, and the volume is very huge." Bo Faqiang said.
Through the new release of EZVIZ's "blue ocean model", a new generation of AI-centered architecture - EZVIZ HomePlay OS, and the capability upgrade of cloud open services, EZVIZ network visual services have begun to enter a new stage of value release in the known scenarios and unknown fields that we are facing together.
The backbone behind high value is technology. For EZVIZ, continuous investment in scientific research and innovation is the foundation for maintaining EZVIZ to lead the way in the field of intelligent IoT.
In the industry, EZVIZ has always been a R&D-driven innovation enterprise, which can be reflected from the annual report data. In 2023, EZVIZ will invest 731 million yuan in R&D, a year-on-year increase of 21.18%, accounting for more than 15% of total revenue.
It is understood that in response to the development of interactive large model technology, EZVIZ has reorganized the intelligent algorithm engineering department internally, gradually built a heterogeneous AI inference engine, and carried out research and development coverage in key technical fields such as visual understanding, audio interaction and multimodal recognition, improved the proportion of self-developed AI interaction capabilities, and supported the company's basic AI capabilities of multi-category IoT devices and highly reliable AI services of the Internet of Things cloud platform.
In EZVIZ's planning, in the next ten years, EZVIZ will continue to focus on the vision technology it is good at, rely on the Internet of Things cloud platform, continue to enrich industry components, improve efficiency tools, cover a wider range of fragmented scenarios, better assist developer customers to develop solutions for complex scenarios, and help business innovation in thousands of industries. "EZVIZ will work with ISV customers to usher in a new era of AI, open and complementary, and win-win cooperation." Bo Faqiang said.