BEIJING: At a factory in Central China, production once depended on workers dashing between machines, adjusting schedules by hand and fixing faults after they occurred. Today, artificial intelligence quietly orchestrates the entire process — allocating tasks, monitoring quality and optimizing output in real time. The machines no longer wait for instructions; the system thinks for itself.
This shift captures what China calls “AI Plus” — the deep integration of artificial intelligence with the real economy. Under the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), the implementation of the “AI Plus” initiative is expected to be elevated to a national campaign, designed to foster new quality productive forces. It is driven productivity not by scale alone, but by technological breakthroughs, smarter resource allocation, and industrial upgrading.
Artificial intelligence is central to this transformation because it is a general-purpose technology — much like electricity or the internet — that reshapes how economies function across sectors. Accelerating the development of next-generation AI is essential for securing a leading position in global technological competition. In practice, AI is already redefining the fundamental factors of production. Workers collaborate with intelligent systems to upgrade skills, tools evolve into smart equipment and data become a production factor as vital as land and capital.
The impact is especially visible in China’s traditional industries, which still account for more than 80 percent of manufacturing output and remain the backbone of economic stability. Rather than replacing these industries, “AI Plus” is giving them a second life. Different regions are pursuing tailored paths. Zhejiang promotes industry-specific large models through closer coordination between chips and industrial molds. Guangdong’s “hundreds of industries, thousands of models” initiative pushes digital transformation across entire manufacturing chains. In Hunan’s Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban cluster, engineering machinery firms are moving from isolated enterprise-level automation to coordinated, cluster-wide intelligence, supported by shared digital platforms. Concrete results are already emerging. At Zhuzhou Qianjin Pharmaceutical, an established drug manufacturer in Hunan, AI-driven production scheduling has cut monthly planning time from three days to less than 30 minutes, while output has risen by 33 percent. At Hunan Valin Xiangtan Iron and Steel, more than 40 AI applications — from intelligent crane dispatch to coke quality prediction — have enabled a full digital upgrade of steel production. These examples underline a critical point: AI is not hollowing out traditional industries; it is making them more resilient, efficient, and competitive. At the same time, “AI Plus” is opening new growth frontiers. Advances in large models and falling computing costs are pushing AI out of laboratories and into everyday production and services, generating new technologies, products, and business models. As a strategic research hub in artificial intelligence and advanced computing, Xiangjiang Laboratory has tackled several critical bottlenecks, including stem cell intelligent preparation, embodied AI interaction and control, and domain-specific large models. Its fully automated stem cell adherent preparation system is among the first of its kind worldwide, while the Xiangjiang Xuanyuan Pathology Large Model has been recognized among China’s leading domestic AI pathology models. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
