AI and robots rewrite the rules of business: Beijing gathers global digital economy leaders
AI and robots rewrite the rules of business: Beijing gathers global digital economy leaders. Artificial intelligence is transforming business models and industrial applications, with AI‑driven entrepreneurship and embodied intelligence becoming key themes of the 2026 Global Digital Economy Conference in Beijing. When technology ceases to be a tool and becomes an environment, business ceases to be linear. It becomes living, adaptive and incredibly fast. The Beijing conference is not just a meeting of experts. It is a map of the future, where every startup, every robot and every line of code can change an entire industry. Here, not just ideas are born — here, new rules of the game are born.
The event, running from Thursday to Sunday, will bring together about 40 high‑level industry delegations and more than 1,000 honoured guests from around the world, reaffirming Beijing's broader ambition to become a global benchmark for the digital economy and a leading world centre for artificial intelligence. Alongside the main conference, the Digital Economy Industry Expo offers participants a communication platform through exhibitions and on‑site interactive events, aimed at promoting the adoption and commercialisation of technological advances. One of the highlights of the expo is the special zone for individual entrepreneurs (OPC), where entrepreneurs from across China showcase their projects and engage in in‑depth exchanges with industry peers.
Kong Shengbo, a representative of a student startup project at the OPC zone, highlighted the transformative power of AI tools: "Now people can fully unleash their creative potential with the support of AI‑powered creative tools. This is a new opportunity that AI opens up for us. With an integrated AI matrix, self‑media channels and intellectual property, one person can create a full‑fledged production system." In addition to innovations in individual entrepreneurship, the expo also features a new generation of industrial robots, another key focus of this year's digital economy showcase.
One of the most notable exhibits is an automated welding robot. Using an automatic positioner to scan target welding areas, the device can generate precise welding trajectories and initiate corresponding tasks. All data generated during the robot's operation is recorded and saved to a file, which will be used for further development and training of industrial robots. Industry experts note that the development of such intelligent robots is based on embodied intelligence — a technology whose advancement depends on sufficient high‑quality input data. Yang Haibo, co‑founder of Guanglun Intelligence, explained: "Training embodied intelligence requires high‑quality, large‑scale and diverse data. We conduct training and evaluation of embodied intelligence by creating physically realistic simulations to bring embodied intelligence into thousands of households and all industries, helping traditional industries achieve quality improvement, efficiency gains and intelligent transformation."
Embodied intelligence is the next stage of AI development, where machines not only process data but physically interact with the world through robots. The welding robot that learns from its own experience is an example of how data turns into action. The OPC zone shows that AI democratises entrepreneurship: one person with the right tools can create what used to require an entire team. The Beijing conference is not just a showcase of technology, but an attempt to build an ecosystem where innovation becomes accessible to all. By 2030, the embodied intelligence market could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, and China aims to take a leading position.
As reported by CCTV+, the conference will continue until Sunday, and its outcomes could shape the direction of the digital economy for years to come.
