Viewing New Highlights of the Intelligent Economy from the Zhongguancun Forum Annual Conference

Beijing in March is full of spring spirit, and the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum annual conference kicks off as scheduled. Making coffee, sorting packages, playing the piano and drums… at the event site, all kinds of robots show off their signature skills, vividly reflecting a new atmosphere as artificial intelligence accelerates into real life.

“Customer in Party 23, please pick up your meal.” Following the voice, the humanoid robot “Mouzi” from Qianxun Intelligent (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. skillfully threads candied hawthorn through bamboo skewers. The meal-delivery robot “Kuafu” from Leju Tong (Beijing) Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. steadily delivers the meal tray to the customer; after completing the delivery, “Kuafu” makes a heart gesture toward the onlooking guests, drawing waves of praise.

Unlike past one-off displays and show-style performances, this year’s robot bistro features several heterogeneous robots working under unified scheduling, each showcasing their strengths: the greeter robot warmly welcomes guests and guides them to order; the cooking robot waves its “arms,” making fresh candied hawthorns and tanghulu-like treats; the delivery robots weave back and forth, delivering accurately— from placing an order to receiving the meal takes less than two minutes, with no manual intervention throughout. Clearly defined division of labor and precise movements make people feel as if they’re in a future restaurant.

“When multiple orders are processed concurrently, how multiple robots are allocated, and how delivery robots are assigned—these steps are a concentrated expression of robots’ brain-like scheduling capabilities.” Wang Qiang, director of embodied operations algorithms at Leju Robotics, introduces that the bistro was met with great popularity as soon as it opened. “Yesterday we operated for about 5 hours in total and received more than 130 orders.” Wang Qiang said. In the not-too-distant future, companies will find more application scenarios suited to embodied intelligence, so that technology truly serves people’s everyday lives.

In addition to service industries, several of Leju’s humanoid robots have already been applied in industrialized scenarios. It is reported that in 2025, the company delivered a total of several thousand full-sized humanoid robots “Kuafu.” At present, industry enthusiasm is rising rapidly, and a period of explosive growth has arrived for both technological breakthroughs and market expansion.

Gao Qingxun and others from Lingxin Qiaoshou (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. also sensed changes in the market: “In the past year, sales of the dexterous hands have grown by nearly 10 times. At present, our share in the high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand market exceeds 80%.” At the Zhongguancun Forum annual conference on-site, the robotic hands brought by Lingxin Qiaoshou attracted many eyes with their flexibility and craftsmanship—plucking strings, playing music, threading needles, and guiding thread through a needle eye.

The needle-threading robot senses the positions of the needle and thread through vision and tactile sensors, aligns them accordingly, and with its “two hands” steadily threads a fine line with a millimeter-level diameter through the needle eye. “The price of our dexterous hands is one-tenth of the same-type products abroad, or even one-twentieth or one-thirtieth. In the future, our costs will be even lower, enabling them to enter more people’s daily lives.” Xu Guoqing said.

In the brain-computer interface field, the acceleration of deployment and transformation is also running at full speed. “Beinao No. 1,” the brain-computer interface that drew widespread attention at the Zhongguancun Forum last year, has again become a focus this year. Yuan Yaning, a staff member at the Beijing Institute of Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Research, said, “‘Beinao No. 1’ adopts a semi-invasive wireless brain-computer interface technology route, and since the beginning of 2025 it has completed 7 cases of human implantation.”

“This year, ‘Beinao No. 1’ will officially launch a comprehensive registration clinical GCP trial. It mainly targets patients with cervical spinal cord injuries, and we expect to enroll 50 to 100 patients throughout the year.” Yuan Yaning said. The “Beinao No. 2” brain-computer system, which uses an fully invasive technology route, is expected to begin clinical validation this year.

The rapid advance of frontier technologies cannot happen without strong support from the industry. A relevant person in charge of Beijing Zhongguancun Capital Fund Management Co., Ltd. said the company established a special fund on Beinao with a size of 400 million yuan. Through a directed-fund model, it supports the R&D and industrialization of “Beinao No. 1.” “We’re not just investing money—we’re building bridges.” Relying on Zhongguancun’s innovation ecosystem, they are opening up the entire process from the lab to the clinic and from R&D to the market, helping it accelerate deployment and enabling this frontier technology—once thought out of reach—to truly benefit patients.

When robots learn to collaborate and “go to work,” when robotic hands can thread needles and pluck strings to create curves, and when brain-computer interfaces take step by step from science fiction into reality—each pulse of technological innovation is quietly changing our lives, and is also more clearly outlining a new industrial landscape in which artificial intelligence moves from “showy demos” to “real deployment,” and from “single points” to “collaboration.”

(Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, March 28)

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