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 actually built a strong foundation to support its AI economy and made considerable contributions to AI worldwide. Stanford University's AI Index, which assesses AI improvements around the world across various metrics in research study, development, and economy, ranks China amongst the leading three nations for global AI vibrancy.1"Global AI Vibrancy Tool: Who's leading the worldwide AI race?" Artificial Intelligence 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 economic investment, China accounted for almost one-fifth of worldwide private financial investment funding in 2021, bring 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 financial investment in AI by geographic area, 2013-21."

Five types of AI companies in China

In China, we find that AI companies normally fall into one of 5 main categories:

Hyperscalers develop end-to-end AI technology capability and work together within the ecosystem to serve both business-to-business and business-to-consumer business. Traditional market companies serve clients straight by developing and adopting AI in internal improvement, new-product launch, and customer care. Vertical-specific AI business establish software and services for particular domain usage cases. AI core tech suppliers provide access to computer vision, natural-language processing, voice recognition, and artificial intelligence capabilities to establish AI systems. Hardware companies supply the hardware facilities to support AI need in calculating power and storage. Today, AI adoption is high in China in finance, retail, and high tech, which together represent more than one-third of the nation's AI market (see sidebar "5 types of AI business in China").3 iResearch, iResearch serial market research on China's AI market III, December 2020. In tech, for example, leaders Alibaba and ByteDance, both home names in China, have actually ended up being understood for their extremely tailored AI-driven customer apps. In reality, many of the AI applications that have been widely adopted in China to date have actually remained in consumer-facing industries, moved by the world's largest internet consumer base and the ability to engage with consumers in new ways to increase customer loyalty, earnings, 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 professionals within McKinsey and throughout markets, along with extensive analysis of McKinsey market evaluations in Europe, the United States, Asia, and China specifically between October and November 2021. In performing our analysis, we looked outside of business sectors, such as finance and retail, where there are already mature AI use cases and clear adoption. In emerging sectors with the highest value-creation potential, we concentrated on the domains where AI applications are presently in market-entry phases and could have a disproportionate impact by 2030. Applications in these sectors that either remain in the early-exploration stage or have mature market adoption, such as manufacturing-operations optimization, were not the focus for the purpose of the study.

In the coming years, our research indicates that there is incredible opportunity for AI growth in brand-new sectors in China, consisting of some where development and R&D spending have actually generally lagged global equivalents: automotive, transportation, and logistics