Chinese companies are expected to achieve a visible competitive advantage from data productivity, if they can better leverage business intelligence and artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, according to a top executive of a business intelligence firm.

Chen Min, general manager of product development of FanRuan, a leading Chinese business intelligence firm, said that as AI language model technology continues to reshape various industries, business intelligence has become an emerging tool for Chinese companies to integrate AI into their business operations.

"If used well, all enterprises will be digital companies, where data will become their visible competitive advantage on the global stage, and at the same time, a new quality productive force driving economic development," he said.

Chen's comments come at a time when leading tech companies globally have accelerated steps to develop BI, or business intelligence.

Business intelligence aims to transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for the purposes of business analysis.

Last June, US-based tech giant Microsoft took the lead by integrating its AI assistant Copilot into its enterprise digital tool, Power BI, which made the very first step of revolution in the industry by combining AI with BI.

"Compared with leading countries, China still has a gap in terms of business intelligence development and many Chinese companies still need to develop their business intelligence capabilities," Chen said.

However, he noted that Chinese business intelligence companies are better than foreign firms in offering integrated business intelligence solutions that span the entire process, including data construction, supplementation, governance, and the building of asset and data centers.

According to the National Data Bureau, China's data production now accounts for 10.5 percent of the global total. By 2025, China's data could account for nearly 30 percent of the world's total data scale.

To meet such an emerging need, the Beijing-based company recently launched FineChatBI, a conversational business analysis tool, where it can engage in multiround conversations for further clarification of business questions, retrieve the necessary data from databases, and provide visualized feedback to users.

"Our goal in using AI models to transform BI is straightforward. We want to lower the threshold for data analysis so that everyone can become a data analyst," Chen emphasized.

FanRuan, founded in 2006, mainly offers business intelligence tools to help companies improve their business operations. As of June, it has served over 30,000 clients both at home and abroad.

It has helped XCMG, a heavy machinery manufacturer, for instance, build five sets of analytical metrics and dashboards at the factory, workshop, production line, process and equipment levels.

With the help of such business intelligence tools, XCMG said that it has achieved real-time monitoring of over 400 pieces of equipment, directly boosting equipment utilization efficiency from 36.7 percent to 56.1 percent.

Chen said, "While using data for communication, management, decision-making and innovation, the company aims to enhance data thinking to bridge the cognitive and capability gaps of business personnel, so that they can truly enable BI to transform data into new quality productive forces."