Ping An Technology is leveraging AI music to boost stickiness of its financial products

Is nothing safe from the reach of the machines? After replacing humans at repetitive tasks, beating them at games of skill, artificial intelligence is now making inroads into the arguably the last frontier: the creative arts. 

Ping An Technology, a subsidiary of China’s second-largest life insurance company, has developed an award-winning computer algorithm that can generate original melodies after “studying” hundreds of pieces of piano music.

But the company has no intention of stopping there. It is working towards using AI to create virtual singers and write original pop music based on individual tastes with a longer term goal of composing a symphony to potentially rival Beethoven.

“Be it a Chinese version of break-up songs similar to Taylor Swift’s style or a Shanghai accented voice that raps like Justin Bieber, with the upgrade of the AI music system we will be able to create whatever music you like as long as we know the genre and the type of singers you adore,” said Xiao Jing, chief scientist of Ping An Technology.

Founded in 2008 as an in-house provider of information technology services for companies within the Ping An group, Ping An Technology has been betting big on AI, including development of applications such facial recognition and voice recognition.

The new mission of the tech arm is to not only boost the group’s own business but also to export its know-how to other financial institutions, public utilities and manufacturing firms that are adapting to the digital era amid Beijing’s Internet Plus strategy and China’s national push to be a worldwide leader in AI by 2030.