(Yicai) April 28 -- China’s artificial intelligence industry has moved past the technology validation stage, but challenges around commercialization are becoming more apparent as companies scale up, industry experts said at a recent WAIC Connect event in Hong Kong.

The April 24 event, held at Cyberport and jointly organized by WAIC Connect, the China Creative Technology Overseas Promotion Association, and Alibaba Cloud, marked the first time the World Artificial Intelligence Conference extended its brand to Hong Kong. The move is seen as an institutional effort to position the city as a hub for Chinese AI firms expanding overseas.

Experts agreed that enterprise AI applications have evolved beyond single-point capabilities and proof-of-concept testing. Li Hongtian, a senior AI engineer for Hong Kong and Macao at Alibaba Cloud, said competition has shifted from large models themselves to the ability to coordinate multiple intelligent agents to execute complex task chains. “This has become a systems engineering problem,” he said.

Commercialization Gap Widens as Capital Turns More Selective

As technology advances, commercialization outcomes are diverging.

Gu Chenhao, chief researcher at Huizheng Finance, said capital markets have become far less tolerant of unproven business models. “Compared with 2021, when high valuations could be supported by future expectations, investors now focus on commercialization capability, operational sustainability, and compliance progress,” he said.

Luo Yili, head of overseas business at Facishare Technology, argued that the industry has taken the wrong approach to sequencing. “Technology development and commercialization should proceed in parallel, not one after the other,” he said.

At the same time, AI is lowering barriers in creative production. Si Wenhui, co-founder and chief operating officer of Paichen Shanghai Intelligent Technology, said generative tools are reshaping content creation. “You just need to tell it your idea, and it can quickly produce what you want. For anyone with creativity, this is a powerful and democratizing tool,” she said.

After a decade in creative marketing services, Paichen has pivoted to AI and developed its proprietary tool IPVISE, which has been used in content production for multinational firms, including AstraZeneca, with output distributed overseas.

According to data shared at the event, producing a 60-second commercial video traditionally takes 35 to 60 days, costs CNY30,000 to CNY120,000 (USD4,100 to USD16,500), and requires a team of seven to 12 people. Using IPVISE, the process can be shortened to three to 10 days, with costs reduced to CNY5,000 to CNY30,000 (USD732 to USD4,100) and a team of one to three people. Si added that the company plans to launch IPVISE 2.0 soon.

However, she noted that the tool has yet to form a complete overseas commercialization loop.

Compliance remains another key concern. Yang Xuan, vice president for Asia Pacific at the Linux Foundation, said AI development must operate within legal boundaries. “AI is not a lawless space," he said. "Much of what AI can do is built on open source, but open source does not mean anything goes.”

Yang warned that companies expanding overseas without sufficient expertise in open-source compliance could face “very serious consequences.”

Editor: Emmi Laine