1 The next Frontier for aI in China might Add $600 billion to Its Economy
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In the past years, China has constructed a solid foundation to support its AI economy and made considerable contributions to AI globally. Stanford University's AI Index, which evaluates AI advancements worldwide across numerous metrics in research, advancement, and economy, ranks China among the top 3 countries for global AI vibrancy.1"Global AI Vibrancy Tool: Who's leading the global AI race?" Expert System Index, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford University, 2021 ranking. On research, for instance, China produced about one-third of both AI journal documents and AI citations worldwide in 2021. In financial financial investment, China represented nearly one-fifth of international personal financial investment funding in 2021, drawing in $17 billion for AI start-ups.2 Daniel Zhang et al., Artificial Intelligence Index report 2022, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford University, March 2022, Figure 4.2.6, "Private investment in AI by geographical location, 2013-21."

Five types of AI companies in China

In China, we find that AI business generally fall under one of five main categories:

Hyperscalers develop end-to-end AI innovation capability and team up within the ecosystem to serve both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. Traditional industry business serve clients straight by developing and adopting AI in internal transformation, new-product launch, and client service. Vertical-specific AI companies develop software application and solutions for particular domain usage cases. AI core tech providers provide access to computer vision, natural-language processing, voice recognition, and artificial intelligence abilities to develop AI systems. Hardware business supply the hardware facilities to support AI need in computing power and storage. Today, AI adoption is high in China in financing, retail, and high tech, which together account for more than one-third of the nation's AI market (see sidebar "5 kinds of AI companies in China").3 iResearch, iResearch serial marketing research on China's AI market III, December 2020. In tech, for example, leaders Alibaba and ByteDance, both household names in China, have actually ended up being understood for their extremely tailored AI-driven consumer apps. In truth, the majority of the AI applications that have actually been extensively adopted in China to date have remained in consumer-facing markets, moved by the world's largest web customer base and the capability to engage with consumers in new methods to increase client loyalty, profits, and market appraisals.

So what's next for AI in China?

About the research

This research is based on field interviews with more than 50 experts within McKinsey and throughout industries, along with substantial analysis of McKinsey market assessments in Europe, the United States, Asia, and China specifically in between October and November 2021. In performing our analysis, we looked outside of commercial sectors, such as finance and retail, where there are currently fully grown AI use cases and clear adoption. In emerging sectors with the greatest value-creation capacity, we concentrated on the domains where AI applications are currently in market-entry phases and could have a disproportionate effect by 2030. Applications in these sectors that either remain in the early-exploration phase or have mature industry adoption, such as manufacturing-operations optimization, were not the focus for the purpose of the study.

In the coming years, our research shows that there is remarkable opportunity for AI development in brand-new sectors in China, consisting of some where development and R&D spending have traditionally lagged worldwide equivalents: automotive, transportation, and logistics