This session explores China’s growing role in the artificial intelligence economy, including how AI is being adopted, developed, and influencing economic trends across the country.
At Davos 2026, panelists described China’s “AI Plus” strategy as less about chasing AGI headlines and more about scaling adoption across the real economy. Professor Gong Ke noted the plan, announced in August, prioritizes “diffusion, adoption, penetration of AI” and “move AI from chat to product to services,” targeting AI-agent and intelligent-terminal adoption above 70% by 2027 and over 90% by 2030. Investors see opportunity beyond models: Hisham Alrayes argued value accrues “through the full spectrum from power generation to data centers to chips to technology, software and capital market,” emphasizing disciplined objectives that “trickle down into the economy.”
Executives highlighted tangible ROI and cost pressure. Tencent’s Dowson Tong described broad functional use—coding, design, accounting—plus retail design acceleration, marketing conversion gains, and pharma drug discovery. He added that Chinese enterprises demand “good ROI” and “lower the cost of using AI,” while a vibrant, open-source-heavy ecosystem continues to drive inference costs down. Moonshot AI’s Yutong Zhang framed China’s edge as efficiency under constraints: building frontier performance “by only using 1% of the resource,” via fundamental research and production engineering.
Workforce and education are central. Gong cited nationwide AI literacy from primary school and upskilling to address a 5 million AI-capability gap, while warning education must foster deep thinking, not “instant answer” dependence.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this issue briefing of China's AI plus economy. My name is Gwen. I'm from China Global Television Network. We are now at a pivotal moment. Artificial intelligence is rapidly transitioning from a technological frontier to a core driver of global growth. By 2030, AI is expected to contribute about 15 trillion USD to the global economy, and China is expected to capture about a quarter of that value in 2025. 87% of Chinese companies plan to increase AI investment, and more than half reported faster deployment. And China's national AI plus action plan is accelerating integration into vast industries the manufacturing, health care, finance, just to name a few. And China's scale, integrated policy approach and a vibrant market offered a unique model for the global AI adoption. So to delve further into China's AI plus development, I'm privileged to be joined here by an outstanding panel of speakers, and they come from different backgrounds, from academia, industry, frontier innovation and global finance. Please allow me to introduce them. Professor. Let me start with, Mr. Dawson Tong, senior executive vice president of Tencent and CEO of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group. Very warm. Welcome to you both. Dawson. And, next to him is Miss Yutong Zhang, founder and president of moonshot. AI. Thank you so much for joining us. And next to him is Professor Goenka, executive director of the Chinese Institute for New Generation AI Development Strategies at Nankai University. Welcome, Professor Gong, and last but not least, Mr. Hesham Aureus, Group CEO of Gfh Financial Group. It's such a pleasure to have you with us. So the session is about 30 minutes long, including our discussions and a very brief Q&A session. And just a reminder, if you would like to share your thoughts about this session on social media, please use the official hashtag Am 26 and let's dive right in. Let me start with Hisham, because I'd like to have a global investor perspective. We're now in this unprecedented fervor of AI investment, but discussions about the AI bubble, you know, the intensity of capital investments meets uncertain paths of return also grow quickly. So I know you are an investor who navigates cycles. And in what areas are AI generating, you know, tangible, measurable economic value today?
Thank you for having me today. I think the, we had a discussion this morning in the governance session and there was a poll and, 60% of the people think it's not a bubble. And the opportunity to, to, to capture the value is still there. And I think that, there is substantial value, and returns to be extracted out of this, new, market changing, invention and change and not to not only in AI specific, but also through, through the full spectrum of from power generation to data centers to chips to technology, software and capital market. So, so, the advancements of technology require heavy investments. And, and we come with from the wealth management and asset management and the and and and you see the developments throughout the world, whether through in China or in the states or, or, or also from our region, the requirements of government investment. Solo cannot drive and take it to the next level. So you'll see a lot of the founders and and companies they raise globally and and the when their capital markets are stronger, you will see more advancements, stronger research and higher delivery, and a shorter cycle for delivering return investments. So, I think the opportunity is massive. And, the we are just at the beginning and the, The ability to transform this into, throughout the, the economy to create a true value in short period of time, as the, whomever does that will be the winner. And I think, China A+ is, as a, as a true serious desire to deliver on that to win the race.
Right. You're spot on.
China's AI plus action plan is what we're going to zoom in now. Professor Guan, give us an academic, you know, perspective on China's AI plus action plan and how, it shows about the potential of AI in creating growth drivers across China's economy.
Yeah. Actually, the AI Plus action is a national initiative, officially announced last year in, in August. So, in this document, if you read the document, you cannot find any words talking about AGI. You cannot find any words talking about the chips. It does not mean the Chinese government don't, understand the importance of AGI, don't understand the importance of chips. But that means the Chinese government lay more emphasis on the diffusion, on the adoption, on the penetration of AI. And to make AI really make values in production and in the daily life. So the the main direction is to move AI from chat to product to services. So there are two goals. Was set in two steps. First by 2027, next year, the popularized the diffusion rate of AI agent and the terminal intelligent terminal will exceed 70% and by 2030, over 90%. So that's the goal of the diffusion of China. This is the goal of AI plus. Right.
And let me turn to you, leading AI company at the, you know, frontier. What how do you think about China's approach, like focusing on the diffusion and does not mention AGI? And if we talk about the diffusion of AI, what are the biggest, you know, blockers or enablers of AI adoption in economy?
Yeah, I think, China is a very unique market. I think China market is huge in many perspectives. You know, it has a huge, manufacturing industry, huge retail industry. I think many industry give us the environment to build a real, scalable system in production. You know, there will be, like many datas, many use cases that people can try use AI to couple with. So I think this is one of the advantage, in China market. And I think secondly is the openness to new technology, because we have seen it continuously. The pattern in several of the technology wave, you know, in EV, in solar, in smartphone, in autonomous driving, I'm personally surprised 85% of the Chinese people think autonomous driving is safe and also can improve their. Yeah, their lifestyle and, and, you know, productivity. So that's why I think China has like thousands of robotaxi already, you know, run in like tens of the cities. So I think this like openness to technology really ready to embrace new technology. It's very unique for China. And also I think lastly, I think AI actually helps a lot on, really deliver a hyper productivity tool for the individuals, even today, you know, like, we are still, a startup company. We do a lot of hirings. The resume that we receive are personal website already. Nobody actually give us the PDF anymore. They use the web coding product, you know, people with zero knowledge of code before, but they can, you know, create this, like, beautiful, personal website to applying for jobs. So I see this like, adoption is, you know, from different, layers of drivers.
That's right. And DAOs and Tencent is serving vast industries and you see the full spectrum. Just tell us how Chinese, you know, technology and industrial leaders are integrating AI into drive tangible results.
Well, we definitely work with a lot of, customers from different industries to deploy all forms of AI. When people talk about AI, I think we might, tend to think of one big, super system, and give it a term AGI. But in fact, in reality, there are many different types of models that serve different purposes. And more specifically, when you look at, different industries and different enterprises, they are trying to use AI in every single function, within their operation. For example, at Tencent, not only many of our programmers are using, coding tools extensively to, churn out features much faster than before. We are also seeing product managers, designers, accountants, basically, you know, from different roles, are using these modern tools to automate their work, building tools that otherwise wouldn't be possible, to, to, to, enhance individuals productivity. Some of the customers that we work with in the retail sector, for example, they, some of them use gen, photo technology, gen 3D model technology to speed up their product design cycle. We help a lot of customers to use AI to, get better ROI on their marketing, dollars that they spend by better targeting, more personalized service that leads to better conversion. And not to mention there are a lot of, AI applications in healthcare. We help some of the pharmaceutical companies, with drug discovery. So I think, we're seeing a lot of, energy positive energy to endorse AI. In the current environment. One thing I want, I want to highlight, though, is that, it's pretty, common in China that people are looking for good ROI. They want to, lower the cost of using AI. And, for us, we as part of our cloud technology, we always look for, optimization for, the cost of using AI so that it can be, distributed. It can be diffused to a much wider community, leaving nobody behind.
And, Hisham, let me bring back the your global investment perspective. Now, you have heard about China's national strategy and also these business dynamics. What do you think about China's, you know, AI plus development and do you find it maybe how do you compare it into global AI development?
Yes. So my view is, one to, start from the top. Yeah. So it's the, it's the discipline and direction, whether it's a country or a region or is it it's or even if it's a company. So in my, in our company, I, I went and we assigned 10% of the of the yearly objectives of all chiefs that they have to see how to adapt the AI and not to adapt AI as an interface, but how to transform that to an actual efficiency. Now, if you take that example and move it to a country, you will see the, the compounded benefit into the economy. Then you look at the open structure of the China AI, philosophy, let's call it. Then you have the, non-open structure. Okay. And that, signal that the benefit, they want to see it to trickle down into the economy and to the companies. So it's a more affordable. So so it's not the benefit of that company, of that product, the return of that individual. It's not an individual. It's an economy. And this is very interesting. And they have applied that across the economy. Now in our region, you will see also a very leading models in UAE for example, and how they want to to make the AI as a part of mandatory Learning process and schools also in Bahrain. Yeah. So different countries are taking different, commitment, levels. And I think soon or now we are seeing AI becoming as a part of the lifestyle. So it's more of the lifestyle and how you, you utilize that. But it's very interesting to see the what's the endgame? I think China is looking to create value throughout the economy, very clear, with very specific objectives across the economy, not just as a benefit of those companies. And the, and this is the difference in the philosophy. I think.
That's right. That's a very no, your observation is very, right on the point, because China is really integrating AI into various aspects of the economy and talking about the economy. It ultimately is about people's economy and how we work. Professor Guan, in your opinion, how is China's AI push influencing workforce strategies from talent development to organizational design?
Actually, back to the the national initiative AI. Plus, there are six, emphasis, six focuses identified. First is to use AI, to empower Sci-tech, R&D. And second is to enhance the capability of our production industry, including, agriculture, and to to increase the quality of our production, to reduce the carbon emission and so on and so forth. And the third is to increase the domestic consumption. That is very important, choice to make this, because that's on the other side. China is trying to decrease the trade surplus worldwide. So we increase the domestic consumption. Early this morning I heard from Jingdong JD that the goods named with smart has doubled the the last year. And, the fourth one is to increase the welfare of the citizens, including education and, health care. Talking about education now in China, we have very ambitious program to embed AI basic literacy from the primary school and also in university. The AI agents widely used. For example, in my university there is about 1000 different kinds of agents, is used by professors and students to help their studies, their learnings. So, that's the program. I think it is very important for the young people to have the capability to use AI. We don't know the future job, but we know definitely the future job needs the capability of using AI.
Right. And I think China is definitely a setting out these priorities. And you don't you're in the industry and a lot of people are comparing the environment of AI development between China and other major countries. When it comes to, you know, like infrastructure or energy or other key elements to drive the future AI development. In your opinion, what support are proving the most critical in scaling the successful AI use?
I think I think there are definitely, differences that, what we are trying to do, I think, we have built a comparable, state of the art performance model, but by only using 1% of the resource of the, you know, comparable, Frontier Labs. So I think the, I think the difference is from day one, that we know that we don't have the luxury to just scale up the compute. So I think our development approach is more about, we do a lot of fundamental, research and innovations. So the founder of the company is actually from academia, you know, all the technology of AI, actually, all from academia, very, open community. And then we actually focus a lot on, doing the fundamental research to trying to increase the efficiency. So I would say the, the efficiency of development is very important. And not many companies can do that. I think, a lot of the research are just stay at the lab, but we spent a lot of time to making all the research work, in a production system with all the engineering mindset to make it work at scale. You know, like, moon, the optimizer that we are using, we are the first one to make it workable in a large language model training. And also, we have the linear attention, we call it linear, which is faster than the full attention system. So I think we did a lot of things to make sure that the efficiency is really, really high. And this is what, you know, has been defined when you are developing the AI systems from China. So I think from the support, perspective, definitely, infrastructure is very important. I think China always has an infrastructure first thinking we're doing everything, you know, to build a highway and to build, electricity plants. And also, the huge data centers in multiple cities. So I think that really makes the supply, very, very cheap. So that will not, you know, unblock the innovations from, Frontier Technologies. So I think that will be a very helpful. And, but the company also needs to be extremely efficient.
So efficiency is a key word here. Also, would you agree would you like to list some of the factors you know, the most important to scale on AI development in China. And how is China doing that?
Well, efficiency is definitely a very important drive, in the China market. But in addition to that, I think, one thing, that's, of note is that, the China AI ecosystem or technology ecosystems in general is very vibrant. There are a lot of players, in the model side compared to some other markets. I think the number of model companies, we have a lot more in China, and in fact.
Hundreds of them.
And, and they work together to. Yeah, right. A lot of them are open source. And two of the biggest IPO, in the Hong Kong stock exchange this year where AI companies with very different focus, one focus on, consumer side, overseas market, the other open source, but more on the enterprise side and including moonshot. It's also a partner of ours, even though we also have our own, model, called. Hi. But the interesting thing is that, there are so many players in the ecosystem with open source being a very, strong driver, that helps lower the cost, of, doing the inference using AI. We're seeing the cost of using AI in China, at least for the past 18 months, continue to, come down and, and and for, for Tencent, we understand that customers want choices. You know, there are many different use cases, for a company. And, they might want to use different models of different sizes for different purposes. So our focus, as part of the cloud strategy, is to provide tools, products that are, model agnostic, support different types of models. I think that gives, the the power of choosing the right model for themselves, back to the hands of the customers.
Right. And no one has talked about energy. And I'd like to ask Professor Gordon about this, because energy use is really one of the, the crucial elements in AI development in the future. Do you think China is well positioned to provide energy? Much needed?
Yes. Actually, there's a another very important initiative relevant to the AI development is called, the the energy infrastructure, built mainly with green energy in the western part of China because we are, rich wind power and solar power there and use the wideband transmission network to help the companies in the western coast to use that computer power. So we call it, that's the data in the West and the computer power, computer power in the West, but data in the east. So that's a big issue. That means, by the end of 2030, a large amount of power used by AI would be green. Renewable power.
Fantastic news. And we may have a few extra minutes to open this to, to the floor and, Okay. Please, please, briefly introduce yourself and ask questions.
Thank you so much for sharing the insight. I am Sayaka Tanaka and I'm from Japan, and, I'm the founder of waffle, which is mission is to close the gender gap in tech industry and also, engage in policy recommendation. And I have a question to Gong Gong. And I'd like to understand the level of the content of AI education in Chinese elementary and junior high and high schools. Is creative education, such as developing product using AI, not just, not just AI literacy, including in compulsory education. And also how are the teachers trained or supported so that they can teach AI effectively?
There's a nationwide, program for teaching, the teachers training the trainers to use AI. And also we carefully adopted the United Nations framework for the competence of teachers and students in AI. So, if, if you could see China is the first country to have the white paper, on the AI application, in education. So if you have a chance to read that white paper, you can get more information.
Can I,
Add to that? I think the new generation learns AI, not only from, schools and the traditional education institutes, by, you know, having a free, tools, in our case, like, what we call yuanbao, many, young generations can go to, these, ChatGPT, like, app, to ask questions to, meet their curiosity needs, I think encouraging, the new generation to be curious and use, these freely accessible AI tools would be the best way to develop the habits of, using AI as part of the learning tool.
Indeed. Please.
Thank you for an interesting session. My name is Saeed Ansari. I'm an economist from Oman. And, I am curious, you know, anybody can answer actually about the impact or the negative impact of using AI, on education especially, and on, labor market. You know, adopting technologies has always been also part of adaptation has had negative impact. In on education, on, economic activities, especially the labor market. I don't know if you have assessed or looked into that. And what was your conclusion and how you have already adapted. And I'm very happy to see that you have a white paper for use of, of AI in education system, but maybe you have already an experience. And I have seen some of the negative impact of adopting, AI and the impact on people's education abilities and so on, and also on the traditional jobs and the markets that usually we everybody can do. And now it is being done by AI. Thank you very much.
Let me answer your question about education because there's a negative side. So the challenge is how to help students to use AI to, empower their deep thinking, not, satisfied by the instant answer. That's a very big challenge. And also, talking about the workforce, the, the the employment by far, that's the early phase of AI adopting the, the the, employment is increasing last year, the year before last year. And in the Chinese job market, this deficit is 5 million workers, required to have the AI capability, but. Along with, deeper adoption of AI, there are some job will be replaced. So there's a nationwide plan to upskilling the workers to be able to use AI and to find new, tasks, which is powered by AI. So I stop here. Thank you.
Yeah, I think I just want to add some echo to Professor Gong's comments. I think it's not not not necessarily a negative effect, but I do see change in terms of, you know, the people that, you know, we want to work with, like a new type of AI native organizations. So we really, emphasize on having the people have general intelligence capabilities rather than specializations. I think that's like a trend because AI can provide some on demand, expertise in the domain. And also, I think for the organizations, the historical function based organization structure will also be changed. So I think secondly is, I feel like human creating new knowledge at a faster speed than before, at least for the past two years. I sleep very little. And, you know, we have a lot of progress. And we, I think every day is like we're feeling that the learning ability is very important than the past experience, because the past experience and the past knowledge may get expired sooner than before. So I think that's that is also very important. So actually I think the education system, if they can adapt to develop more general thinking and general knowledge and also. Yeah, and also like a good, really good like learning ability, really good AI proficiencies. I still think, you know, like, we are, still finding difficulties in hiring rather than, the opposite.
I think we need to learn.
How to ask the right questions. That's a very important. Yeah.
Maybe no time for one. Maybe. Just. Can you do it very briefly.
So last year, it was noteworthy, American supremacy in AI was celebrated. And three weeks later, there was the deep sea moment. What's the likelihood we have something similar this year? How far are we from another deep sea problem?
Don't know, don't know.
We will launch a new model very soon.
The model is quite good. Kimi is a good model.
Okay, let's let's wait and see. And, you know, there are always new excitement on the horizon. And let's, you know, we have this open minded, you know, participants in this industry. And let's hope for more progress in the sector. And thank you so much for joining us. And if you continue with this, your thoughts about the conversation, you can use the hashtag M26 on social media. The session is concluded. Thank you so much.
Thank you.