Shanghai Accelerates 'AI+Manufacturing' Ambitions with New Industrial Roadmap

A batch of city-level industrial AI pioneers, innovative applications and joint laboratories were unveiled in Shanghai on Thursday, marking the city's big step in integrating artificial intelligence into the manufacturing sector to build a resilient and secure industrial chain.

Industry officials at a conference, held by the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization and the Shanghai Industrial Internet Association, highlighted that AI is poised to revolutionize industrial upgrading through AI agents, specialized industrial corpora and advanced robotics. These technologies will span critical high-end sectors, including aerospace, automotive manufacturing and semiconductor fabrication.

Zhang Ying, deputy secretary-general of Shanghai, stated that the city leverages the advantages of "AI+Manufacturing," focusing on key areas such as R&D (research and development) design, production manufacturing and supply chain management. By collaborating with professional service providers and upstream/downstream enterprises, Shanghai will cultivate a robust new ecosystem.

Since 2022, Shanghai has cultivated 42 industrial chain "leaders" across automotive, high-end equipment and aerospace sectors. They have connected 360,000-plus enterprises, linked more than 2.3 million industrial equipment units and developed over 1,800 industrial software solutions. These efforts have helped reduce enterprises' operational and maintenance costs by 20 percent and decrease equipment energy consumption by 10 percent.

The city also released an "AI+Manufacture" white paper, and founded a public AI testing and service platform during the conference. State telecom giants China Unicom and China Mobile released industrial-oriented service platforms for industrial firms in Shanghai, with their AI infrastructures and resources.

About a dozen companies showcased their industrial AI applications and products onsite, such as multi-arm industrial humanoid robots, AI agents for finance and manufacture process management and automatic monitoring for printed circuit board production.

Shanghai's strategy fits well with China's national blueprint. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and several state-level regulators released a blueprint for AI-powered manufacturing. By 2027, China aims to establish a world-class and reliable industrial AI ecosystem, with three to five AI models and 100 high-quality industrial corpus and 500 pioneering applications.