ZTE Chairman Fang Rong: Empowering Industry Upgrades with Intelligent Cores and Ensuring AI's Goodness through Security and Ethical Safeguards

Xinhua Finance Hainan Boao, March 27 (Reporter Chen Biqi) - The Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2026 was held from March 24 to 27 in Boao, Hainan. Fang Rong, Chairman of ZTE Corporation, attended this year’s forum and participated in the roundtable forum themed “Entering the AI Era: Seizing Opportunities, Creating the Future,” sharing industry insights and ZTE’s practices around the two core topics of AI integration with traditional industries, and AI security and ethical governance, contributing a Chinese corporate solution to the high-quality development of the global digital economy in the AI era.

When discussing how companies can define their positioning in industrial upgrading and cross-industry transformation, Fang Rong pointed out that competition in the AI era has surpassed traditional “cross-border” thinking, and essentially involves dimensional empowerment. ZTE is committed to becoming the “intelligent core” of the industry. Fang emphasized, “For customers, what is lacking is not more equipment, but a ‘brain’ that can turn vague experiences into precise decisions. The core of our products is delivering decision-making certainty.” In terms of market positioning, ZTE focuses on the areas with the most complex processes, lowest fault tolerance, and highest data dependency, thereby building a competitive moat that is difficult to imitate.

Regarding the balance between industrial upgrading and the erosion of industrial foundations, Fang Rong proposed replacing “physical possession” with “digital sovereignty.” She pointed out that from an economic return perspective, the core of industrial upgrading is to enhance capital return rates. ZTE empowers flexible manufacturing through AI technology, achieving an upgraded production model of “small batch, diverse variety, and quick response,” with returns from complexity dividends far exceeding the labor cost savings from industrial relocation. The key to preventing the erosion of industrial foundations lies in core technologies. By intellectualizing core technology model intellectual property, even if the physical assembly process is transferred, as long as the core “brain” and rules are in hand, the industrial foundation has completed digital transformation rather than loss.

Discussing the long-term foundation for industrial development in the AI era, Fang Rong emphasized that talent is a core asset rather than a cost. Ultimately, competition in the AI era is a competition for human-machine collaborative efficiency. ZTE does not aim to replace manpower with AI; rather, it focuses on amplifying human value with AI. This “human + AI” organizational form is something that any low-cost labor region cannot easily imitate in the short term, and it is also the truly non-transferable industrial foundation and the ultimate barrier for future competition.

In the face of challenges brought by the rapid development of AI technology, such as algorithmic bias and privacy breaches, Fang Rong particularly emphasized the importance of data security and AI ethics in her speech. She believes that security is the foundation of trust in AI, and ethics is the premise for intelligence to be benevolent. ZTE always considers data security, network protection, and AI ethical construction as core competitive strengths of the company, rather than mere compliance requirements. A dedicated technology ethics committee has been established to embed ethical reviews into the entire product process, and to publicly disclose practical results in the company’s sustainable development report, winning social trust through transparency.

In December last year, ZTE, in collaboration with ByteDance, launched the world’s first AI smartphone with the Doubao mobile assistant in a technical preview version. The core value of this type of AI innovation technology is to enable people to do more things, rather than simply replacing manpower or reducing manpower scale. This new paradigm also brings new requirements to existing rules, standards, and norms. Regarding the latest progress of ZTE’s AI innovation implementation, Fang Rong introduced, “Related work is currently being accelerated, and we hope everyone can use AI smartphones on a large scale.”

In terms of system-level AI capability layout, ZTE has integrated advanced agent technologies such as OpenClaw, launching its self-developed “Co-Claw,” which officially went live on the first working day after the Spring Festival. Fang Rong stated that currently, ZTE is not only building an efficient working environment of human-machine collaboration and coexistence with AI internally, but is also promoting application implementation for both B-end and C-end, especially focusing on data security to solidify the safety foundation for large-scale AI applications.

Editor: Luo Hao