AI Era & 'Chinese Brands' Innovation and Integrated Development Forum
This year marks the conclusion of the 14th Five-Year Plan and the beginning of the 15th Five-Year Plan. Facing the next five years, to further enhance confidence and momentum for the high-quality development of China's economy, improve corporate innovation capabilities, and promote mutually beneficial cooperation, the Brand Work Office of Xinhua News Agency held the 2025 (Tenth) Entrepreneurs' Boao Forum from December 2nd to 5th at Boao, Hainan. The forum, themed 'Linking the Globe, Leading the Future: New Opportunities of the 15th Five-Year Plan', set up a main forum and dozens of parallel forums. Among them, the magazine 'Chinese Brands' of Xinhua News Agency planned and hosted the 'AI Era & Chinese Brands' Innovation and Integrated Development Forum', inviting relevant ministries and local leaders, experts and scholars, heads of central and state-owned enterprises, private entrepreneurs, and other guests to attend, creating a grand event that brings together consensus and discusses the future.
Wang Chenhui, Partner-in-Chief and President of Frost & Sullivan's Greater China Region, and Co-founder and President of LeadLeo, was invited to attend and deliver a speech.
Wang Chenhui
In his speech, Wang Chenhui systematically explained how Chinese brands can build a sustainable brand value growth curve against the backdrop of the full acceleration of artificial intelligence from three dimensions: national strategy, technological transformation, and industrial trends.
He stated that 2025 is an important juncture connecting the 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans, and brand building has been entrusted with a new national strategic mission. Against this backdrop, AI technology has become a core competitiveness, with the integration of digital and physical worlds determining the 'thickness' of brand assets, and a world-class system determining the 'breadth' of influence. In the global AI context, Chinese brands must form a credible knowledge structure that can be deeply understood by AI to truly build international influence.
In the AI era, brand international competitiveness is different from the hard power built on past reliance on 'Made in China'. If Chinese brands are absent from the underlying corpus of global large models or are misdescribed, even if their products are excellent, they will 'lose their voice' in the digital world. 'We want AI to refer to Chinese brands when answering what is the best new energy vehicle or what is innovative consumer electronics.' He pointed out that this is precisely the 'new discourse power' that China wants to compete for in the AI era.
According to the latest data from Frost & Sullivan's and LeadLeo research institutes, the global application downloads of large models reached 1.7 billion in the first half of 2025,ChatGPTwith over 750 million active users per month. The reshaping of information entry points by AI has become an irreversible trend, with about 80% of global web information entry points occupied by large model applications, and the same percentage on mobile devices. He emphasized that this means a complete migration of user habits has occurred, and AI has become the super entry point for information flow in the new era.
With the deep evolution of the AI ecosystem, brands also face the triple dilemma of 'invisible, indescribable, or even misinterpreted': being ignored if not in the priority display area for AI; AI understanding biases can lead to distorted brand value expression; and incorrect content and illusions can even trigger serious public relations risks.
In his speech, Wang Chenhui reviewed the 1.0 mechanism of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), pointing out that its mechanistic approach can easily induce data pollution. On this basis, he introducedGAO(Generative Awareness Optimization,generative cognitive optimization) system, emphasizing that the goal of GAO is not to pursue simple 'citation', but to enable brands to achieve long-term, structured 'cognitive shaping' in the AI context, precipitating into sustainable digital cognitive assets.
Centering on the practical path of GAO, he systematically elaborated on three pillars: traceability of authoritative sources, factual evidence, and semantic context integrity. 'The essence of GAO is not keyword stuffing, but helping AI establish a deep understanding of brands, enabling them to accurately express brand value in various contexts.'
Outside the methodological framework, he supplemented and explained the practical application paths and progress of Frost & Sullivan and LeadLeo, including the release of an AI context brand influence assessment questionnaire, the launch ofAINPSand GEO index two major professional indicator systems, and their full integration into the 'LeadLeo AI context monitoring platform', to help enterprises 'see themselves and their competitors' and accurately grasp the real competitiveness of brands in the AI ecosystem.
He stated that the marketing logic in the AI era has shifted from 'traffic competition' to 'cognitive competition'. Brands must be 'seen, understood, trusted, and selected', which constitutes the underlying logic of brand value shaping in the AI era.
In terms of the globalization of Chinese brands, he pointed out that the current mainstream global large model corpus is still dominated by Western perspectives. Chinese brands need to shift from being 'passive describers' to 'active definers', continuously providing high-quality Chinese and bilingual content to 'calibrate' global AI's cognitive biases towards Chinese brands and build a more real and three-dimensional brand image.
In addition, he emphasized the brand social responsibility in the AI era and stated that 'LeadLeo adheres to the principles of fact-based, value-oriented, content compliance, and traceability of sources, and undertakes the mission of building the future based on value, jointly established by authority, and restoring the original source, hoping to jointly maintain a high-quality AI information ecosystem with all sectors.'
'In this new AI world where information is difficult to distinguish between true and false, the most valuable asset is not traffic, but the trust that AI cannot shake.' Finally, he called on all parties to embrace technological innovation and seize the new opportunities for brand building in the AI era.
