New mobility services with AI brain

From Earth to the planet Neptune and back and repeat five times: 48.8 billion kilometers. That’s the distance traveled by customers of mobility service provider DiDi worldwide in 2018. That makes the Chinese firm the number one ride-hailing platform, leading the market with approximately 7.5 billion rides organized each year — nearly twice as many as the American provider Uber. But DiDi is more than just a taxi service. “We now manage around 30 million movements per day globally,” says Liu.

The company was only founded in 2012, but Liu already sees DiDi as a key player in a societal shift: “We are committed to collaborating with policy makers and taxi industries to solve transportation challenges, together with environmental challenges.” Rapid urban growth is posing major challenges, as Liu points out, including congestion and pollution.

“We solve the complexity of transportation with a single transportation platform app.” DiDi projects the number of driven kilometers booked through the digital transportation platform app to increase by 10 billion annually. The provider intends to use the data it gathers to expand and improve its array of new mobility services.

Ideally, society and the business sector will benefit equally from analyzing this data: “Currently, DiDi gains over 100 terabytes of data on new locations and road planning.” The mobility service provider collects this data in the “DiDi brain” an AI system “responsible for our big data development strategy, including big data analysis and machine learning, that gives us the capability to automate the transportation platform for efficiency,” explains Liu.

DiDi believes the spread of IoT systems will fuel this development. “IoT will be very crucial to building AI systems, and you can rely on IoT systems to maximize your applications in the mobility field,” says Liu. Increased inter-networking of devices means a larger trove of data to form the basis for making important decisions, such as optimal scheduling of bus and rail services, creating new mobility offers in particular urban areas, or providing larger bike or car-sharing allotments at certain times of the day.

DiDi is looking to do business with fleet clients via another application, offering a complete package ranging from leasing and financing to vehicle sales, technical service, and full fleet management. The company is working intensively to achieve fully networked mobility, but also to achieve the same within its own organization.

Towards this end, 31 alliances with automobile industry partners have been formed so far. For example, electric vehicles of automakers can be integrated into the DiDi platform. DiDi is thus one of the world’s main players in implementing forward-looking new mobility concepts.