English: Logo of the People’s Daily 中文: 人民日报题字 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

China’s leading paper, Peoples’ Daily reports that China will roll out a slate of important artificial intelligence projects and step up efforts to cultivate AI talent as part of the country’s upcoming national plan to gain a lead in the cutting-edge technology, citing a senior official’s comment yesterday.

Source: China intending to take lead with national AI plan – People’s Daily Online

This is important for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it highlights that China plans to be No 1 in this important area of technology

Secondly, it demonstrates the robustness China’s competitive model, with clear stages of strategy, prioritization and highly focused delivery – this is the competitive model of the 21st century

Thirdly, it highlights the strategic dangers of trying to ‘muddle through’, relying on ‘weak and wobbly’ leadership rather than optimizing strategy and mobilizing the critical enablers for effective delivery.

Thoughts for the day, many western technology companies seem too reliant on optimizing today’s market rather than being true pioneers and everywhere the public sector is full of roadblocks preventing optimal value for money solutions. Apart from China, Israel provides an outstanding example of leveraging technology to strategic advantage.

Related articles

• Robots could make the UK over £200 billion richer by 2030
• Facebook’s AI crosses language barrier to assist in Spanish
• Every single senior at this low income D.C. school earned their way into college
• Highlights from the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York 2017
• China plans to lead 5G network adoption by 2030
• Tim Cook confirms Apple is working on driverless cars
• Tim Cook finally confirmed that Apple is working on self-driving cars (AAPL)