Street installation for 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference Photo: VCG

In Shanghai, the final countdown to one of the world's largest artificial intelligence (AI) events has entered its last stage. Inside the exhibition halls, interactive screens are being tested, robotic arms are undergoing repeated adjustments, and engineers are making final preparations before thousands of AI products meet global visitors, the Global Times observed while walking through the exhibition halls on Thursday. 

The 2026 World AI Conference (WAIC) & High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance will offer visitors a vivid glimpse into how AI is evolving - from being perceived as cold industrial machinery to becoming intelligent companions that are increasingly integrated into work, daily life and entertainment.

Under the theme of "Intelligent Partners, Co-create the Future," the most prominent feature of this year's conference is its strong focus on practical applications, the exhibition's organizer told the Global Times on Thursday.

Twenty-nine countries on Thursday signed an agreement in Shanghai on establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization., the Xinhua News Agency reported. 

The WAICO will be an independent intergovernmental international organization headquartered in Shanghai, according to the agreement.

The organization will uphold the purposes of the UN Charter, be committed to extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit and adhere to a people-centered approach, according to the agreement. It aims to promote international cooperation and global governance on AI, ensuring that AI is beneficial, safe and fair, thereby promoting its healthy and orderly development to benefit all humanity, Xinhua said.

Set to open on Friday in Shanghai, WAIC 2026 is bringing together more than 1,100 companies and over 3,000 exhibits, with more than 300 AI products making their global debuts, the latest official data showed.

Visitors will not only get a close look at the latest AI breakthroughs, but also see how these technologies are being applied in real-world scenarios spanning manufacturing, healthcare, education and elderly care, the organizer said.

Hundreds of application-driven exhibits will highlight a broader transformation: AI is becoming a new type of productive force, injecting fresh momentum into industries across the board.

Global debuts closer to daily life

Ahead of the conference, some Chinese advanced intelligent manufacturing companies exclusively shared with the Global Times details of cutting-edge AI products that are set to make their public debuts at the event.

The rapid improvement in humanoid robots' dexterity will be showcased through several products.

At the conference, LimX Dynamics will debut and showcase its OmniHand 3 Ultra-M dexterous hand, and the visitors will see a bimanual balloon-dog folding demonstration, which represents the world's only publicly showcased demonstration of such a function, the company told the Global Times on Thursday in a statement. 

The OmniHand 3 Ultra-M is designed to match the size of a human hand, featuring 20 degrees of freedom, visual-tactile sensors integrated into the fingertips of all five fingers, and distributed three-dimensional tactile sensing points across the palm. These features enable the dexterous hand to perform highly precise manipulation tasks. 

Also, Agibot, together with JD Logistics, has jointly developed a new-generation safety-certified heavy-duty embodied intelligent robot, Genie G2 Max, Agibot said in a statement to the Global Times on Thursday. 

The robot features an 18-kilogram payload capacity for a single arm and a standard 38-kilogram payload capacity for dual arms, with a peak payload of 50 kilograms, making it one of the industry's strongest in terms of load capacity, the company said. It can also perform sub-millimeter-level precision operations and supports autonomous charging and battery swapping, enabling uninterrupted 24/7 operations.

Meanwhile, SenseMart Go, an AI retail solution developed by SenseTime, will showcase its new embodied intelligent robotic store, where humanoid robots flexibly and efficiently handle retail operations, SenseTime said in a statement to the Global Times.

Visitors can scan a QR code to experience the complete shopping process, with in-store robots capable of independently picking and placing products, organizing shelves, conducting inventory checks, and handling basic exceptions, according to the statement.

Beyond embodied intelligence, WAIC 2026 will also showcase breakthroughs in AI models and computing infrastructure that support broader applications.

During the exhibition, MiniMax will showcase its next-generation native multimodal flagship model, M3. Supporting up to 1 million tokens of context, the model is built on MiniMax's proprietary MSA (MiniMax Sparse Attention) architecture, delivering enhanced performance in long-context processing, Coding, and Agentic tasks. 

A Chinese brain-computer interface company BrainCo will officially launch what the company describes as the world's first integrated, graphical, one-stop AI research platform for brain-controlled robotics research and development - the BrainCo Brain-Controlled Robot Training Platform - during the exhibition, the company said in a statement to the Global Times on Thursday.

With the platform, developers without prior BCI expertise can enable "mind-controlled" robot operations within just 10 minutes.

In addition, the Securities Times reported that Huawei's Atlas 950, the industry's largest commercial supernode, will make its debut at the conference. The system features a minimum configuration of 64 cards per cabinet and can scale up to 8,192 NPUs, specifically designed for training and inference of trillion-parameter AI models.

From breakthroughs to applications

The breakthroughs showcased at WAIC 2026 are not limited to technological advances, with some cutting-edge innovations already being integrated into industrial chains and transforming daily manufacturing.

Notably, the Global Times has learned that the exhibition has built a humanoid robot manufacturing workshop, featuring a fully automated new energy vehicle production line operating in real time. 

Covering five major processes - from battery module assembly to interior speaker installation - the production line replicates a real new energy vehicle manufacturing process. Each operational scenario corresponds to real-world industrial applications, offering visitors a firsthand look at how AI is reshaping industrial manufacturing, the organizers told the Global Times on Thursday.

For example, visitors will see intelligent robots perform tasks such as picking, screw fastening, power connection, and fully automated assembly and lighting tests for vehicle lamps, demonstrating highly precise and efficient operations, according to the organizers.

The booming AI ecosystem showcased at WAIC 2026 reflects China's sustained efforts to strengthen technological innovation and develop new quality productive forces, Chinese experts said.

As China's 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30) begins, AI has been identified as one of the key emerging technologies driving industrial upgrading and future economic growth. This year's top policies have emphasized accelerating the integration of AI with manufacturing, services and scientific research.

Such applications reflect a broader push to accelerate the commercialization of AI through policy support, industrial capacity and market demand.

As AI rapidly moves from laboratories to solve problems in factories, hospitals and supply chains, Chinese policymakers have set their sights high, anticipating the rise of a "smart economy." 

China's 2026 Government Work Report also supports the creation of new forms of the smart economy: "We will advance and expand the AI Plus Initiative. We will promote faster application of new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents and encourage large-scale commercial application of AI in key sectors and fields, so as to foster new forms and models of AI-native business. We will support the development of open-source AI communities and build a vibrant open-source ecosystem." 

The global AI industry is moving beyond a phase of rapid technological breakthroughs and entering a new stage where deep applications and global governance advance in parallel, Chen Jing, vice president of the Technology and Strategy Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday.

In the past, AI was often measured by its technological capabilities. Today, both industries and society are placing greater emphasis on its ability to deliver practical services. This is a shift from a technology-driven approach toward a more human-centered one, Chen said.

"China's experience shows that AI can achieve greater value by integrating with the real economy, leveraging extensive manufacturing capabilities and diverse application scenarios to create a positive cycle between technology development and practical needs. With policy support and market-driven innovation working together, AI is moving from laboratories into factories, homes and cities. The future of AI will be defined not by computing power or model parameters alone, but by its ability to solve real-world problems," he added.