The debut of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) can be traced back to 1956. It was invented by a scholar of MIT namely John McCarthy and a group of researchers who engage in the study of A.I.. A.I. is primarily used to solve the problem that is straightforward for human being but hard for computer. The technology can be translated into various applications. Radica System, a Hong Kong based IT startup, successfully applied A.I. into CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Its products, Obert and Radica Intimate, won the HP/Intel/MCVF Innovative Mobile Services Award in 2002 in Singapore. Radica is the only Hong Kong IT company that receives such honor.

Filling up Market Gap by Innovative Technology and Idea
Nowadays, personalization has been the irresistible trend of customer relationship management. It is really a challenge for marketers to customize product or service according to the specific needs of every individual customer. The traditional CRM system is obviously unable to address such emerging needs. Radica unveils the market gap between the market needs and the supplies, which provide the solid ground for them to develop the new generation CRM by wisely placing the A.I. technology as the core. The new system could facilitate the customer service to be an effective vehicle to enhance sales.

Radica's flagship product, Obert, is a 100% Java based application, which employs Automated Collaboration Filtering (ACF) technology and multi-strategy manipulation program. With unique A.I. technology incorporated into the core "brain" of the application, it could act like an intelligent e-salesman that can automatically identify customer's unique preference and provides 1-to-1 recommendations to stimulate customer's purchase according to the information like comments of product, shopping history, browsing records and personal information that provided by customer.

Helping Health Insurer to Increase 15% Sales Over SARS
The latest success case of Radica's product is to help BUPA, one of the largest health insurers of the world, to increase its brand awareness and sales turnover during SARS period. Seeing the big demand for the first-hand updates about SARS, officials in BUPA decided to provide timely news and statistics about SARS cases and market its health medical plans at the same time. In the critical moment, Radica helped BUPA to immediately launch a custom-tailed Anti-SARS campaign within less than 1 week, providing daily news update and accumulated statistical figures about SARS cases. With Radica's technology in place, the respondents were directed to a special page at BUPA's health gallery Web site filled with news and information about the progress in the fight against SARS and also health contents of various categories. BUPA reported more than 1.5 million hits at its special SARS Web site in May alone during the campaign. As a result of interest generated in the campaign, BUPA says it enjoyed a 15 percent growth in sales for the months of April and May compared to the same period a year earlier.

Successful Experience
In the past years, Radica has successfully acquired a number of multi-national corporations to be its client. From a small startup to the market pioneer of artificial intelligence technology and application in Hong Kong, the success of Radica is owing to the following key factors.

• Understanding of the worldwide technology trend
• Selecting appropriate technology according to its capability to be the core of R&D
• Developing practical product based on the market needs
• Creative R&D and marketing approach
• Flexibility in providing service to customer

This success story clearly demonstrates the ability and strength of Hong Kong IT company and at meantime provides a good reference to local counterpart.