New official and industry data suggest China’s AI economy is entering a more commercial phase, with implications for how brands plan campaigns, produce content and manage digital commerce.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center, China had 1.125 billion internet users by the end of 2025, with 602 million generative AI users, equal to 42.8% of the population. The same reporting said generative AI users were up 141.7% from the end of 2024, while internet penetration reached 80.1%.
The scale of adoption is beginning to matter commercially. Xinhua’s English-language coverage of the latest government work report said China will “advance and expand” its AI Plus initiative in 2026, promote faster application of AI agents, and encourage large-scale commercial deployment across key sectors. Separately, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said China had more than 6,000 AI enterprises in 2025, with the country’s core AI industry expected to exceed 1.2 trillion yuan and intelligent computing capacity reaching 1,590 EFLOPS.
Recent official reporting also shows AI is moving beyond chat interfaces and into production systems. The latest CNNIC-linked reporting said AI applications are already spreading across sectors including steel, non-ferrous metals, power and telecommunications, and are being used in R&D, quality inspection and customer service. It also cited a case in which AI helped a new-energy manufacturer cut defect rates from three per thousand to five per ten thousand.
For marketers, the relevance is increasingly practical rather than theoretical. A March 2025 iResearch survey found 85.7% of respondents had used or understood AI-based applications. Among those aware of AI marketing applications, the most recognised use cases included AI customer service (60.4%), AI shopping assistants (53.1%), virtual try-on (48.8%), AI livestream or digital-human hosts (48.4%), AI-generated copy or images (46.5%), and AI-generated promotional video (40.5%). China’s internet advertising market was estimated by iResearch at 1.13 trillion yuan in 2023, up 12.4% year on year.
Gogetop Marketing said the shift is increasingly visible in content production, audience analysis, campaign testing and social commerce execution.
“China’s AI story is now less about novelty and more about deployment,” said Ann Zhu, spokesperson for Gogetop Marketing. “The significance for brands is that AI is becoming part of everyday operating infrastructure — from content generation and optimisation to customer interaction and commerce workflows.”
Gogetop Marketing agency said the next phase of change is likely to be shaped by three forces: broader adoption of AI-generated content, tighter governance around authenticity and disclosure, and growing use of AI agents in commercial workflows.
