SHI YU/CHINA DAILY

　　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 productivity driven 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.