Song Chen/China Daily
Rapidly evolving artificial intelligence is poised to play a pivotal role in promoting industrial upgrading, helping China build new growth engines and injecting strong momentum into high-quality economic growth, experts and business executives said.
They predicted that the application of technology across various sectors will accelerate in 2026, the first year of the country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period.
They said AI will serve as an essential tool in fostering new high-quality productive forces and usher in a new round of scientific and technological revolution. The country's vast markets, technological capabilities and thriving innovation ecosystem support its ability to move cutting-edge technologies from research institutions to industry.
They added that China is at the forefront of the development and application of AI technology, and multimodal large-scale language models (LLMs) with the ability to process and generate content across multiple modalities, such as text, images, audio, and video, will guide the further development of the AI industry.
AI is expected to contribute $19.9 trillion to the global economy by 2030 and drive 3.5% of global GDP in 2030, according to a report by global market research firm International Data Corp.
The report says that AI will have a significant economic impact by automating routine tasks and creating new efficiencies, reshaping industries, creating new markets, and changing the competitive landscape.
a good start
In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation, shocking the tech industry with its cost-effective open source LLM. Its performance is on par with US technology company OpenAI's leading model, but its cost and computing power are only a fraction of its rivals. This was achieved amid stricter restrictions on the export of AI chips from the United States.
According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology, China maintains its position as a global leader in AI innovation, having released 1,509 AI models so far, ranking first among 3,755 models launched worldwide.
According to a report by the China Cyberspace Research Institute, China holds the most AI-related patents, accounting for 60% of the total.
Leading Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba Group, Baidu, and ByteDance, are stepping up efforts to develop their own AI-powered LLMs to enhance technological advances and commercial applications of AI technology in a wide range of fields, including manufacturing, healthcare, and finance.
In September, Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba's cloud computing division, announced its most powerful AI model, Qwen3-Max, which boasts over 1 trillion parameters and demonstrates the strength of code generation and autonomous agent capabilities.
Autonomous agent capability means that AI systems can make independent decisions and complete tasks independently, with minimal human intervention. Market players said the progress strengthens Alibaba's ambitions to compete directly with major Western companies while accelerating innovation in China's sprawling AI ecosystem.
Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming said the company will increase investment in AI and cloud infrastructure by an additional 380 billion yuan ($53.4 billion) over the next three years. Mr. Wu said that the speed of development of the AI industry and the demand for infrastructure have far exceeded expectations.
“In the future, large-scale AI models will be deeply integrated into a variety of devices, acting like operating systems with persistent memory, seamless cloud-edge coordination, and continuously evolving capabilities,” Wu said. “We remain committed to open sourcing Qwen and shaping it into the ‘Operating System for the AI Age’, enabling developers around the world to build innovative AI applications.”
Since launching the first generation of Qwen in 2023, Alibaba has open sourced more than 300 AI models built on two foundational models. With over 600 million downloads and 170,000 derivative models, Alibaba's AI models are one of the most widely adopted open source AI series worldwide.
Baidu released its latest LLM Ernie 5.0 model in November. The model has multimodal understanding and generation capabilities and can support text, image, audio, and video input and output.
This model has comprehensively upgraded core features and excels in multimodal understanding, following instructions, producing creative writing, and applying tools. They also have excellent comprehension, logic, memory, and persuasion skills.
Robin Li, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said LLM technology is rapidly evolving with the ability to self-learn, iterate and innovate. Mr. Lee said the company will continue to invest in cutting-edge AI models to foster innovation.
He is bullish on the prospect of AI-powered digital humans that can be used in fields such as e-commerce, education, healthcare, customer service, and sales.
competitiveness
China attaches great importance to the development of AI, a strategic emerging field in which major economies are scrambling to gain a competitive edge.
AI is not only important for improving productivity, but also for facilitating the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries.
The recommendations of the Communist Party of China Central Committee on the formulation of the 15th five-year national economic and social development plan emphasized that China should achieve greater independence and strength in the science and technology field and take the lead in developing new high-quality productive forces.
This recommendation was adopted at the 4th Plenary Session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee on October 23.
We will fully promote the “AI Plus” initiative, lead the transformation of scientific research paradigms by AI, apply AI tools to industrial development, cultural progress, public welfare initiatives, and social governance, and strive to gain an advantage in AI industrial applications.
In August, China's State Council released guidelines for the thorough implementation of the “AI Plus” initiative. The guidelines said the country will promote the use of AI in science and technology, industrial development, consumption, people's welfare, governance capacity and global cooperation.
By 2027, China will achieve broader and deeper integration of AI in six key areas, and the penetration rate of new generation intelligent terminals and AI agents will exceed 70%. According to the guidelines, this number will rise to over 90 percent by 2030.
Wen Xi, a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, said that as AI has become a new driving force promoting China's economic development and industrial sophistication, the “AI Plus” initiative is essential to shift the growth engine from the old to the new.
“Thorough industrial integration of AI will improve production efficiency, optimize operational processes, and reduce energy consumption and costs, thereby promoting traditional industries such as steel, textile and equipment manufacturing towards high-end, intelligent and green development,” Wen said.
Mr. Sun Ke, Deputy Director of the Institute of Policy and Economic Research, China Academy of Information and Communication Technology, emphasized the important role of AI in cultivating new high-quality productivity and rebuilding new competitive advantages.
Strong implementation of the “AI Plus” initiative will help accelerate the deeper integration of AI with the real economy, create new industries and new business forms such as intelligent robots, self-driving cars, and smart home devices, and strengthen China's core competitiveness on the world stage, Sun said.
big step forward
According to market research firm CCID Consulting, China's AI market size is expected to reach 1.73 trillion yuan by 2035, accounting for 30.6% of the global market.
Zhu Min, former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, highlighted China's large-scale manufacturing industry and vast consumer market of 1.4 billion people, and said China will make great strides in the use of AI technology in the next 18 months to two years.
The rich industrial application scenarios bring unique advantages to the development of AI, he added.
According to Zhu, China has surpassed the United States in the number of academic papers on AI, taking the world's top spot. These papers are increasingly focused on specific industrial applications of AI, he said.
Zhu said China's services sector, technology and AI have great growth potential, and these emerging fields are promising for future jobs. He added that it is critical to strengthen job retraining and educate people on how best to use AI.
Samantha Zhu, Chair of Accenture Greater China, said China's emergence as an innovation-driven economy is clear with breakthroughs in areas such as AI and robotics, highlighting China's growing capabilities in key technologies that support long-term competitiveness.
“The wave of AI innovation led by open source large-scale language models is very encouraging, and companies are rapidly mobilizing to take advantage of such technology,” she said.
The consultancy estimates that taking a holistic approach to productivity, with generative AI acting as a multiplier, could push productivity growth from 1.9 percent to 15.9 percent. China has one of the world's most vibrant AI ecosystems, driven by a combination of corporate adoption, technology startups, and public-private partnerships.
Zhu said there is strong momentum in AI-driven transformation, with companies rapidly integrating AI into decision-making, operations, and customer engagement.
“Looking at its vibrant AI ecosystem, China is not just an AI market, but a testing ground for large-scale AI adoption by enterprises,” she said.
Li Haitao, dean of Changgang School of Management in Beijing, said AI is significantly changing the business environment and is bound to transform various industries. China and the United States have the greatest potential to lead the next round of the AI revolution, he said.
Li said China boasts a large number of well-educated engineering talent and AI experts, improved digital infrastructure such as 5G and computing networks, large amounts of data, and growing innovation capabilities, which provide a solid foundation for training and deploying AI models.
Zhou Yunjie, chairman and CEO of Chinese consumer electronics giant Haier Group, said AI will be the biggest technological revolution in the next 50 years. Currently, AI is primarily being implemented in companies in manufacturing, R&D, sales, procurement, and services.
Zhou said that all industries will integrate AI, and companies that do not adopt AI will eventually be weeded out, adding that his company has invested heavily in the development of LLM and is promoting the application of AI in various fields such as home appliances and industrial internet.
Li Dongsheng, founder and chairman of consumer electronics manufacturer TCL Technology Group Corp., said, “The application of AI in the high-tech manufacturing field will bring greater value than its use in terminal equipment, as this cutting-edge digital technology will greatly improve the production efficiency and competitiveness of China's high-tech manufacturing enterprises.”
Li said that AI is increasingly being incorporated into terminal equipment, intelligent production lines, and product research and development, promoting the development of China's high-tech manufacturing sector.
China's LLM breakthrough and DeepSeek's meteoric rise have enabled China to quickly catch up with the US in AI and surpass most other developed countries in terms of AI applications.
Cui Jingyi, vice president of UK-based industrial software development company Aveva and general manager of Aveva China, said the country has the most widespread application of AI technology, creating new opportunities for many companies, including her company.
He said Abeba will continue to increase investment in the country, leverage local strengths and drive industrial transformation through technological innovation.
fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn
