With over 70 companies racing to build AI wearables and consumer devices, Beijing is turning its manufacturing muscle toward making artificial intelligence part of everyday life.
China is constructing a platform designed to launch new AI consumer products, extending a broader national push to weave artificial intelligence into the fabric of daily commerce. The effort builds on what’s being called the “AI Plus” initiative, an evolution of the country’s 2015 “Internet+” strategy that originally aimed to graft digital platforms onto traditional industries.
The wearables gold rush #
Over 70 domestic companies are currently active in the AI wearables space, with smart glasses emerging as the category’s unlikely star. The roster of players includes Inmo and Rokid pushing dedicated smart glasses hardware, Xiaomi expanding its AI product lineup, and Alibaba, which unveiled its Qwen Glasses at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March 2026.
The Qwen Glasses feature real-time translation powered by Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, with pre-orders scheduled to begin on March 8, 2026.
The sixth China International Consumer Products Expo, held in April 2026, served as another showcase for how quickly AI-powered consumer technology is reaching the market.
From Internet+ to AI+ #
The “AI Plus” initiative follows the same logic as the 2015 “Internet+” framework but applies it to a different technology layer. Instead of connecting businesses to the internet, the goal is embedding AI capabilities into consumer hardware and services.
The current landscape is largely driven by corporate innovation rather than a single centralized government marketplace. Companies are using trade expos, direct-to-consumer channels, and existing e-commerce platforms to get AI products into buyers’ hands.
Why this matters for global competition #
China’s approach to AI consumer products differs from what’s happening in the US. American AI development has been heavily concentrated on frontier models, with OpenAI’s GPT series, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini emphasizing capability at the top of the stack. Chinese firms are instead racing to get AI into the most hands possible, leaning on open-source models, integrated ecosystems like super-apps, and the country’s cost advantage in hardware manufacturing.
In the US, AI features are scattered across dozens of separate apps and services. In China, platforms like WeChat already serve as all-in-one ecosystems for messaging, payments, shopping, and services, providing existing infrastructure on which to layer AI capabilities.
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