Chinese game company NetDragon Websoft sees its shares surge after making AI its new CEO
Last year, NetDragon Websoft appointed a new CEO who was not a human, but an AI bot. This non-trivial solution eventually helped the Chinese company increase the value of its shares.
What happened?
- The Hustle recently released an article titled “Should we automate the CEO?” to look at the results of NetDragon’s experiment of replacing a CEO with an artificial intelligence.
- The company managed to outperform the Hang Seng Index, which tracks the biggest companies listed in Hong Kong. As pointed out by Business Insider, its stock has risen by 10% over the past six months.
- NetDragon Websoft appointed its first virtual CEO in August 2022 as part of its move towards being a “Metaverse organization.” The AI executive named Tang Yu was responsible for streamlining process flow and improving speed of execution, and served as a real-time data hub and analytical tool.
- “Looking forward, we will continue to expand on our algorithms behind Tang Yu to build an open, interactive and highly transparent management model as we gradually transform to a metaverse-based working community, which will enable us to attract a much broader base of talents worldwide and put us in a position to achieve bigger goals,” NetDragon chairman Dejian Liu said.
Who is NetDragon Websoft?
- Founded in 1999, NetDragon is a Chinese company that develops and operates products across various industries, including video games.
- In addition to making in-house titles, it also develops games that are based on third-party IPs from Disney, Electronic Arts, and other Western companies.
- NetDragon’s portfolio includes MMO games like Conquer Online, Eudemons Online, Disney Fantasy Online, and School of Dragons.
- The company also created 91 Wireless, one of China’s largest third-party Android app stores, but sold it to Baidu for $1.9 billion.
