Air conditioners that automatically control the humidity and temperature of a room, based on artificial intelligence-powered voice interactions and machine learning ability to track consumer habits, have already become part of people’s daily lives in China. Nowadays, people can play games, engage in physical exercise, make purchases online and have video chats with friends and family members via intelligent televisions. Thanks to the rapid development of AI, an increasing number of home appliances can be controlled through voice commands and facial recognition, helping to better understand and satisfy the personalized and diversified demands of users. Experts said rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to create new consumption growth drivers and inject strong impetus into China’s home appliance industry, as the cutting-edge digital technology spearheads a new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation.
AI is not only playing an increasingly pivotal role in boosting productivity and reshaping the competitive landscape in the household appliances market, but also driving the transformation and upgrade of the traditional manufacturing sector. The Chinese government recently issued a guideline on deeply implementing the “AI Plus” initiative. According to the guideline, the country will promote the use of AI in science and technology, industrial development, consumption, people’s well-being, governance capability and global cooperation.
By 2027, China will extensively and deeply integrate AI in six key sectors with the penetration rate of new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents surpassing 70%, and this figure will exceed 90% by 2030, the guideline said. Leading Chinese consumer electronics and home appliance makers are racing to incorporate AI technology into manufacturing, products and services.
AI is reshaping the industrial landscape and will be the biggest technological revolution in the next 50 years, said Zhou Yunjie, Chairman and CEO of Chinese home appliance maker Haier Group. “At present, the deployment of AI in enterprises is mainly concentrated in manufacturing, research and development (R&D), sales, procurement and services.” Highlighting that every industry will integrate AI, and any enterprise that does not embrace AI will eventually be weeded out, Zhou noted that the integration of AI models with home service robots and terminal devices will create new growth drivers for the global consumer electronics industry. The company has invested heavily in developing large language models (LLMs) and is promoting the adoption of AI in a wide range of fields such as household appliances and industrial internet, he said. AI models tailored for the smart home domain represent key infrastructure supporting transformation of the traditional home appliances sector, he added.
Li Dongsheng, Founder and Chairman of Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer TCL Technology Group Corp, said, “The application of AI in the high-tech manufacturing sector will bring about greater value than its use in terminal products, as this state-of-the-art digital technology will significantly improve the production efficiency and competitiveness of China’s manufacturing enterprises.” Li said AI is increasingly embedded into intelligent production lines, product R&D, and terminal devices, which will further bolster the development of China’s high-tech manufacturing sector. “We established an AI R&D center in Poland in 2018. Prior to that, we set up an R&D center in the United States in 2011. As a manufacturing enterprise, we will focus more on the application of AI,” Li said. He added that China’s breakthroughs in LLMs, along with the meteoric rise of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, have enabled it to rapidly catch up with the United States in the AI segment, while surpassing most other developed economies in terms of AI application.
This year’s Government Work Report stated that under the “AI Plus” initiative, the nation will work to effectively combine digital technologies with its manufacturing and market strengths, support the extensive application of large-scale AI models, and vigorously develop new-generation intelligent terminals and smart manufacturing equipment. According to a report by China Merchants Securities, the market scale of the smart home devices sector in China will reach CNY952.3 billion in 2025, with the penetration rate of AI technology exceeding 50%. In the next 10 years, smart household appliances will experience explosive growth. “We are pushing forward the integration of AI with data and speeding up the industrial use of AI,” said Liu Jiang, Chairman of Sichuan Changhong Electronics Holding Group Co. The company is leveraging AI to inspect the quality of machines and components to facilitate the automation and intelligent upgrade of equipment and improve the efficiency of production lines, Liu said. Changhong has applied AI technology into areas such as manufacturing, operations and products. It has unveiled plans to establish 66 AI-powered intelligent factories worldwide, and has rolled out AI televisions equipped with LLMs that support multimodal interaction functions including voice, gesture and expressions. Hisense Group said its Xinghai large language model is deeply integrated with DeepSeek, and with enhanced deep thinking and reasoning abilities, its smart TVs can better understand user demands, and provide them with a more natural interaction experience, the China Daily reports.
