by Tan Aik Keong (AK)
Shanghai in July, a sweltering 35 degrees, couldn't keep the crowds away — this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) roughly doubled last year's attendance, with the halls packed shoulder to shoulder, the hottest scene in Chinese tech this summer. Walking the floor, the biggest impression was this: China's AI narrative is shifting from "telling a story" to "putting it on the shelf."
The big-name booths were as busy as ever — Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, iFlytek, JD.com, BYD, all present. But what actually made people stop and look were the almost mundane, concrete use cases. Huawei showed off its Ascend 950 SuperPoD supernode, widely seen as one of the heaviest announcements of the show. Moonshot AI's (Kimi) booth had a giant blue installation filling an entire aisle, and its new Kimi K3 model topped the global leaderboard for front-end coding ability — a genuine point of pride for Chinese-made large models. Retail brands showed up too: Luckin Coffee's AI content factory, L'Oréal's AI "magic mirror," both proof that AI has worked its way into everyday consumer touchpoints.
But the real star of this year's show was robotics. Unitree, AgiBot, Galbot, LimX Dynamics, AIROBOT and others all had a presence, and "embodied intelligence" and "spatial intelligence" became the phrases of the conference. I even placed an order on the spot for a robot cat capable of a continuous 720-degree backflip, with an open interface for further development — priced under RMB 10,000. Robots are no longer just demo-hall performers; they're moving toward an affordable, customisable consumer market.
Another interesting undercurrent was the rise of the one-person company (OPC) economy. Major financial institutions like ICBC publicly voiced support for the OPC ecosystem, and the conference even ran a dedicated "Independent Pioneer Challenge" to back solo founders and tiny teams — some of whose projects are reportedly already valued at up to USD 30 million. It suggests that once large-model infrastructure matures, the bar to starting a company is being redefined: one person plus a good AI toolkit can now carry a business.
Xiaohongshu (RedNote) was worth noting too. The lifestyle-content platform ran a banner proudly promoting "vibe coding on Xiaohongshu," trying to turn programming from an engineer's exclusive skill into something ordinary users can join in on — and a nearby stall was literally selling AI compute tokens priced like snacks, a marketing move earthy enough to draw a smile.
Of course, the show wasn't without gaps. Heavyweight names like Zhipu AI, ByteDance, Xiaomi, DeepSeek and UBTECH were nowhere to be seen — whether by deliberate choice or other arrangements, nobody outside really knows. And despite carrying the word "World" in its name, the exhibitor lineup was still overwhelmingly Chinese companies, making it feel, in some ways, more like an annual parade of China's own AI industry.
Overall, this year's WAIC no longer felt like a distant technical sermon — it felt like a real, touchable, buyable trade show. When even a robot cat can get an impulse buy from an ordinary consumer, maybe that's the clearest sign that the era of AI actually landing in daily life has quietly arrived.
Part of the AK AI Corner column. Originally published in Oriental Daily (东方日报) on Jul 20, 2026.