AI driving transformation of consumer electronics

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 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, they said.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, 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 percent, and this figure will exceed 90 percent by 2030, the guideline said.

The country has recognized AI as essential to fostering new quality productive forces and activating new growth drivers. 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 giant Haier Group. "At present, the deployment of AI in enterprises is mainly concentrated on manufacturing, research and development, sales, procurement and services."

Highlighting that every industry will integrate with 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 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 research and development, and terminal devices, which will further bolster the development of China's high-tech manufacturing sector.

"We established an AI research and development 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 said 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 952.3 billion yuan ($133.9 billion) in 2025, with the penetration rate of AI technology exceeding 50 percent. 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 Ltd.

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.

Statistics from Beijing-based consultancy All View Cloud, which focuses on the home appliances sector, showed that the sales of home appliances in China reached 907.1 billion yuan last year, up 6.4 percent year-on-year, a fresh record.

China's AI sector will make big strides in the next 10 to 15 years, with its market size reaching 1.73 trillion yuan by 2035, accounting for 30.6 percent of the global total, said market research company CCID Consulting.

Gree Electric Appliances, a major Chinese home appliance manufacturer based in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, has embedded its own proprietary model framework into DeepSeek R1 and plans to build an industry-specific AI model based on DeepSeek.

Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of Gree, said the company will bolster the integration of image and voice recognition and other AI technologies with home appliance products, and expects the application of AI in air conditioners to contribute to energy conservation.

"The rise of AI technology will offer better human-machine interaction capacities and advance the intelligent transformation of the traditional home appliances sector, while unleashing immense consumption potential," said Liu Fei, research director of the consumer electronics department at All View Cloud.

Chinese consumers have shown increased demand for high-quality and smart home equipment along with the iteration and upgrade of product functions and technologies, Liu said, adding that the accelerated adoption of AI in household appliances will further stimulate consumers' purchasing appetites, thereby expanding domestic demand and shoring up the economy.

However, some challenges and difficulties have cropped up in the development of smart home devices, Liu said.

AI-powered home appliance products made by different manufacturers usually cannot be connected, and they still rely on foreign suppliers for high-end smart chips, Liu said.

Hong Yong, an associate research fellow at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, said the adoption of AI can reduce production costs, improve the quality of products and optimize resource allocation, thus bringing about huge economic benefits.

He added that the new type of consumption is mainly driven by technological advancements in AI, with a focus on consumers' personalized and diversified needs.

Midea Group is bolstering the application of AI technology in intelligent manufacturing, smart home, robotic and healthcare segments.

Zhong Zheng, vice-president of Midea, called for stepping up R&D investment in AI, especially in core technologies in key fields, establishing a data security and privacy protection system, and strengthening the training of high-caliber AI talent.

Liang Zhenpeng, an independent consumer electronics analyst, said that as smart air conditioners precisely adjust room temperatures and TVs recommend and broadcast programs in accordance with the preferences of consumers, household appliances have turned into people's companions.

China's smart home industry is developing by leaps and bounds, fueled by advances in cutting-edge technologies represented by AI, Liang said, adding that home appliances are creating a more comfortable and smarter home environment for residents with the help of AI.

Liang noted, "The emergence of AI technology will better facilitate the conversational interaction between human beings and home appliance products. Along with people's increasing desire for a high-quality life, the AI-enabled smart home sector has a promising future."

Zhu Keli, founding director of the China Institute of New Economy, stressed on the need for Chinese home appliance enterprises to improve computing power by establishing high-performance computing centers and elevating algorithm design to boost the utilization efficiency of computing power.

fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn