Wang Xiang: Timely investment in embodied AI becomes an inevitable choice for industries

Timely investment in embodied artificial intelligence is becoming an inevitable choice for industries seeking future growth, said Wang Xiang, senior vice president of Chinese telecoms equipment maker ZTE, at a forum held during the Mobile World Congress 2026.

The forum, themed on Embodied AI: Leading a New Paradigm in AI Development, was organized by the World Internet Conference Specialized Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

The forum brought together global policymakers, industry leaders and experts to discuss the future of embodied intelligence.

Wang noted that artificial intelligence was evolving from early-stage perception and information processing towards more advanced phases involving production and physical interaction — a shift widely regarded as being a key trend in the development of the field.

According to the executive, the future evolution of physical intelligence is likely to follow two main directions. One is the development of general-purpose embodied agents with capabilities comparable to humans. 

The other focuses on optimizing and tailoring systems for diverse application scenarios, to achieve the best cost-performance ratio in specific tasks.

From a market perspective, Wang said the industry remained highly optimistic about the prospects of embodied intelligence. 

Forecasts suggested the sector could achieve a compound annual growth rate of more than 70 percent over the next three years and maintain growth above 40 percent over the next decade. 

In fact, such expectations indicated that timely investment in embodied AI was becoming a strategic necessity for industries.

As an enabler of industrial digitalization, ZTE has also explored practical applications of embodied intelligence in smart manufacturing. Wang explained that the intelligent transformation of a factory could be advanced through three progressive stages.

The first stage focused on individual production stations, replacing manual operations with robots designed for specific tasks. 

The second stage extended to the entire production line — integrating robots with different functions to form an automated system capable of completing the full manufacturing process from raw materials to finished products. 

The third stage operated at the factory-wide level — enabling flexible coordination among multiple production lines according to customer orders to achieve optimal delivery.

According to Wang, ZTE’s smart manufacturing practices had already produced initial results. Numbers showed that following intelligent upgrades, labor input across production lines had decreased by about 28 percent, while the adjustment cycle for production processes had been shortened by 20 percent, significantly improving both efficiency and product quality.