On 20 March 2026, the 2026 Jiangsu AI Plus Scenario Innovation and Development Conference was held at the Hanbilou Hotel in Nanjing. Hosted by the Jiangsu Digital Economy Federation, the conference was organised by Linkage Group, Jiangsu Innovation Ecosystem Research Institute, Five Star Holding Group, Shuangliang Group and Jiangsu Ruihua Investment Group. Liu Cong, chairman of the Jiangsu Federation of Industry and Commerce, Ding Rongyu, Party secretary of Jiangsu Open University, and Sun Libin, president of the Jiangsu Digital Economy Federation, attended.
Under the theme "Empowering the Real Economy with Intelligence, Creating a Smart Jiangsu", the conference brought together renowned experts and scholars from Nanjing University, Southeast University and the International Data Association, as well as representatives from think tanks, financial institutions and enterprises. It aimed to pool national wisdom, build an efficient platform connecting government, industry, academia, research and application, build industrial consensus, remove bottlenecks in technology commercialisation and explore cooperation opportunities, thereby building a collaborative AI plus real-economy innovation ecosystem in Jiangsu and injecting strong momentum into the intelligent transformation of the province's real economy and the cultivation of new quality productive forces.
Liu Cong: Safeguarding Private Enterprises on the AI Track
Liu Cong, chairman of the Jiangsu Federation of Industry and Commerce, extended warm congratulations on behalf of the federation and expressed its expectations and support.
He spoke highly of the work of the Jiangsu Digital Economy Federation since its founding and of its role as an industry bond. He noted that artificial intelligence has entered every aspect of China's economy and society. As a major economic and manufacturing province, Jiangsu bears significant responsibility for pioneering and demonstrating national strategies. The conference theme closely aligns with the 15th Five-Year Plan outline and carries profound practical significance.
Liu Cong encouraged the federation to keep building a bridge for government-enterprise communication, connect AI-related policies and solve the problems of enterprises "daring not to use, not knowing how to use and not using AI well". He called for more leading enterprises to strengthen their AI plus innovation and, through deep cooperation, drive joint breakthroughs up and down the industrial chain, forming cluster advantages in key fields such as artificial intelligence, the low-altitude economy and biopharmaceuticals, and creating new AI business models with a distinctly Jiangsu character.
He also called for carrying forward the entrepreneurial spirit, unleashing the vitality of enterprises as innovators, encouraging them to stay rooted in the real economy and focus on their core business, and to be explorers of technology integration, pioneers of product application and builders of industrial ecosystems amid the deep integration of AI and the real economy.
The tide of artificial intelligence surges forward and the blueprint of the intelligent economy has been drawn. The federation will, as always, stand by private enterprises as their champion and safeguard their development on the AI track.
Sun Libin: Aligning with National Direction to Bring AI to Every Industry
Sun Libin, president of the Jiangsu Digital Economy Federation, said in his address that artificial intelligence has been placed prominently in the Report on the Work of the Government and the 15th Five-Year Plan outline, with deepening and expanding "AI plus" listed as a core task. Jiangsu has a solid manufacturing base and abundant application scenarios, and the provincial government has issued the Jiangsu "AI Plus" Action Plan targeting an industry scale of over one trillion yuan by 2030, giving the province unique advantages in advancing "AI plus".
This conference builds a platform for exchange between government, industry, academia and research, connecting frontier university technologies with enterprise application scenarios, helping enterprises find their position amid technological change, understand the broad prospects of the AI industry, identify their entry points, discover new tracks to enter and seize the opportunities of AI development.
The Jiangsu Digital Economy Federation will continue to hold a series of high-end forums around national strategic directions including biopharmaceuticals, embodied intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, 6G communications, the low-altitude economy, future energy and data elements, inviting more experts, scholars and industry leaders to study frontier technologies, assess industry trends and explore cooperation opportunities.
At the same time, it will work to grow more than ten distinctive industry clusters covering digital carbon, digital tourism and artificial intelligence, driving upstream and downstream enterprises to cluster, coexist and innovate together, generating compounding effects of shared technology, shared markets and a shared ecosystem.
Frontier Experts Share AI Research Results and Trends
The conference invited three leading "AI plus" academics: Li Ming, professor and dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence at Nanjing University; Xin Xin, chair professor at Southeast University and executive dean of the Institute of Unmanned Systems; and Wang Chunhui, president of the International Data Association, chairman of the China Data Elements 50 Forum and chief advisory expert of the China Association for Science and Technology. They shared frontier research and trends including advances and challenges in AI, frontier technologies and trends in general-purpose humanoid robots, and AI plus data resources: the underlying logic of value creation from data elements.
Enterprise Representatives Share Live AI Plus Cases
The conference also invited enterprises at the forefront of practice — Linkage Digital Technology, the Southeast University Technology Transfer Centre, Tuoheng Holdings, Yijiahe Technology and Nance Shares — which shared vivid cases and explorations of AI empowering the real economy in vertical large models, brain-computer interfaces, the low-altitude economy, embodied intelligence and geographic survey information.
The conference also announced the federation's preparatory AI Innovation Industry Alliance and its Initiative on AI Innovation and Development.
Going forward, the federation will continue to build high-quality platforms for academic exchange and industrial collaboration, deepen the integration of industry, academia, research and application, empower the intelligent upgrading of all industries, and help Jiangsu seize the initiative and stay at the forefront of the new wave of AI development.
