(Yicai) Aug. 29 -- China’s top economic planning agency issued a roadmap to support the country’s artificial intelligence+ action plan released earlier this week, setting out funding, reforms, and other measures to ensure its effective implementation while preventing “disorderly competition.”

The action plan will hasten the integration of AI with cutting-edge technologies such as the metaverse, low-altitude aviation, additive manufacturing, and brain-computer chips, to drive product innovation, promote new business models, and unlock fresh consumer demand, Huo Fupeng, director of the National Development and Reform Commission’s innovation-driven development center, said at a press briefing today.

At the same time, new scenarios for service consumption will be further developed, Huo said. AI is expected to improve the quality of life in areas such as entertainment, e-commerce, household services, property management, transportation, elderly care and childcare.

The NDRC will also strengthen coordination and cooperation across all parties to “resolutely avoid disorderly competition and ‘follow-the-crowd’ behavior,” said Zhang Kailin, deputy head of its department for innovation and high-tech development.

In the second half of this year, the NDRC will focus on key areas and tasks, which include accelerating the creation of a unified national market and drafting an action plan to promote its rollout, said Li Chao, spokesperson and deputy head of the NDRC’s policy research office. Efforts will be made to remove market barriers, regulate local governments’ investment promotion activities, expedite the revision of the Price Law and issue rules for online platform pricing, he said.

Together with other government departments, the NDRC will take appropriate action to address below-cost dumping and exaggerated or false advertising as well as to resolve problems of disorderly competition in some sectors.

The State Council’s AI+ action plan, released on Aug. 26, focuses on six key areas, namely technology, industry, consumption, people's livelihoods, governance, and global cooperation. The initiative calls for developing new infrastructure, new industrial ecosystems and new jobs, as well as accelerating the growth of new quality productive forces, so that the benefits of AI can be shared by all.

The action plan is divided into three main phases. In the first phase, by 2027, AI is expected to be broadly and deeply integrated across the six key areas, with adoption of next-generation smart devices and intelligent agents surpassing 70 percent.

Second, by 2030, the adoption rate will exceed 90 percent and the intelligent economy will become a major growth engine, promoting broader access to AI and the sharing of its benefits. And third, by 2035, China will fully enter a new stage of smart economic and social development, providing strong support for the realization of socialist modernization.

Editor: Kim Taylor