China’s manufacturing sector is leapfrogging straight into the era of agentic artificial intelligence and is now exporting that playbook to global supply chains, according to the CEO of Black Lake, a Chinese provider of cloud-based AI tools for factories.
“Just as China skipped credit cards and jumped directly to mobile payments, many factories are skipping full traditional digitalisation and jumping directly to AI agents,” Zhou Yuxiang said in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post.
The shift marks a pivotal stage for China’s manufacturing sector. It was moving beyond its traditional advantages of low costs and reliable quality to compete on “agility”, deploying AI tools and agents from design to production so factories could meet small-batch and customised demand in time, Zhou said.
The trend aligns with Beijing’s national “AI plus” initiative, which includes a target of integrating AI into 90 per cent of China’s economy by 2030.
