On October 27, the National Artificial Intelligence Pilot Base for Home Appliances (hereinafter referred to as “Pilot Base”) was inaugurated at Qingdao. The base is constructed by Haier Smart Home, and more than 200 industry experts from home appliance companies, artificial intelligence technology firms, and universities attended the event.
It is understood that the goal of this base is to establish a global-leading pilot production base for “next-generation smart home appliances”. This will enable AI innovation in the home appliance industry to move from individual efforts to a collaborative effort across the entire industry. It aims to solve common challenges in the industry, accumulate reusable public capabilities, promote large-scale and standardized application of artificial intelligence, and explore how China’s rich family scenario advantages can be transformed into technological and standard advantages.
Break through three major common challenges to accelerate the large-scale implementation of AI
Currently, artificial intelligence technology is evolving rapidly and is profoundly changing the global industrial development model. For the home appliance industry, AI is accelerating its integration into products, scenarios, and the industrial chain. However, between technological innovation and industrial application, there are still multiple challenges such as technology transformation, interconnected collaboration, and large-scale promotion.
At the product level, for AI technology to be truly applied to home appliance products and home scenarios, it requires multiple stages such as hardware adaptation, function development, scenario verification, and reliability testing. Each step requires complex scenario verification. At the enterprise level, it is difficult for different brands, categories, and devices to collaborate, as devices do not understand each other, and the cooperation between upstream and downstream entities is also inconsistent. At an industry level, artificial intelligence applications involve multiple capabilities. The dispersed technical solutions of various enterprises result in high costs and long cycles, as well as difficulty in forming industrial synergy effects.
These problems often span multiple enterprises, various technologies, and different industrial sectors. It is impossible for a single enterprise to solve them independently. Establishing a pilot-scale base for the entire industry is aimed at breaking the “isolated efforts” innovation model, bringing together scattered needs, technologies, and scenario resources, and jointly addressing common challenges in the industry.
Develop five major capabilities to create a public platform for industrial collaborative innovation.
The pilot testing base being established this time will develop five major capabilities: product pilot testing, scenario pilot testing, industrial pilot testing, large-scale promotion, and standards and safety.
At the consumer level, the pilot production base will promote intelligent upgrades of products and interconnection across brands and devices, enabling AI to truly enter thousands of households; at the industrial level, it will facilitate further integration of AI into core areas such as research and development, manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, and services, helping to improve the quality and efficiency of the industrial chain.
Relying on these five capabilities, the pilot plant base will play three roles: first, it will act as a “connector” for industrial chain collaboration, promoting coordination between upstream and downstream entities and resolving issues with poor demand-technology alignment; second, it will serve as an “accelerator” for technology transformation, linking research and development with industrial production, thereby speeding up the transition of AI from research to industrialization; third, it will function as a “incubator” for high-quality applications, providing public services, reducing innovation barriers, and allowing innovations to amplify their value through sharing.
The pilot test base is accelerating the integration of forces from various industries. At the launch ceremony, the pilot test base appointed several experts from units such as the China Home Appliances Association, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, and iFlytek Co., Ltd., and signed contracts with early ecosystem partners including Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., China Mobile Communications Group Co., Ltd., and Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. At the launch ceremony, the pilot test base also launched a “AI + consumption” collaborative development matrix, recruiting innovative forces from the whole society to jointly expand the ecosystem.
Establish an operational mechanism where demands come from the industry, and results are returned to the industry.
The public capabilities are established, but more importantly, they must be truly utilized by the industry. To serve the entire industry better, the pilot base has set up two service windows: the “supply and demand operation platform” and the “application service market”, forming a complete operational loop from demand identification, joint research, pilot verification, to result promotion.
At the demand side, the supply-demand operation platform will collect real enterprise needs, identify common issues, and then organize universities, research institutions, and other parties to work together on joint solutions through methods such as “publicly announcing challenges and taking leadership”. At the supply side, mature solutions that have been tested and proven effective in pilot projects will be promoted and applied in the application service market, enabling leading scenarios to provide capacity services to more enterprises. This will create a collaborative mechanism where “demands come from the industry, and results are returned back to the industry”.
At the same time, as the contractor of the base, Haier Zhijia will rely on industrial practices and scenario resources to collaborate with various industry parties in promoting the construction and operation of the base. It will also open up related capabilities to the industry, supporting enterprises of different sizes and types to participate together in technical verification and application of outcomes.
In this sense, the pilot plant is not only a platform for technical validation, but also an important link that connects industrial demands, technological innovation, and large-scale applications. By continuously solving common challenges, improving public capabilities, and promoting mature solutions, the pilot plant will provide more support for the intelligent upgrade of the home appliance industry, driving the market towards more reliable products and more convenient smart home services, thereby enabling artificial intelligence innovation to better serve industrial development.