HARBIN -- Hundreds of entrepreneurs, experts and scholars gathered recently at the Yabuli Ski Resort in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, and discussed the new opportunities provided to China's manufacturing industry by "new productive forces," such as digital technology and artificial intelligence.

"As a manufacturing center and an innovation powerhouse, China boasts the world's most complete supply chain system and a wealth of talent," said Zhao Bingdi, president of Panasonic (China) Co Ltd, at the manufacturing forum of the 24th annual meeting of China Entrepreneurs Forum.

Zhao said the company views China as the most important market, and wishes to identify more opportunities for competition and cooperation with Chinese companies.

Zhou Yuxiang, co-founder and CEO of Blacklake, a Shanghai-based technology company, believes that China's complete industrial chain can turn flexible delivery into a new advantage for China's manufacturing industry. Zhou said that after visiting more than 90 manufacturing enterprises, he found that some suffer from overcapacity while many non-standard customization needs in the market have not been realized.

Zhou said that improving the speed of product delivery and flexible delivery capacity is critical in the face of rapid changes in market demand and trends. This can be achieved by integrating a well-developed industrial chain system and new productive forces, including AI and digital technology.

According to Ye Jun, president of DingTalk, Alibaba's workplace messaging app, AI will usher in a new era of technological change and development.

Ye said that AI plus collaborative office can not only deal efficiently with repetitive affairs, but also bring in-depth reshaping in human-computer interaction, batch decomposition and planning of tasks, and task execution.

He added that the market needs enterprises to constantly touch the "ceiling" of AI large-scale models, and also calls for more small or dedicated models of industries to increase certainty for the execution of specific tasks.

"Tool-type systems like TV, automobiles, and Dingtalk are particularly suitable for small and medium-sized models, of which the output featured certainty. We see great potential for AI in this area," Ye said.

In 2001, a group of Chinese entrepreneurs founded the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum in Heilongjiang. Today, the forum has developed into one of the most influential platforms for entrepreneurs in the country.

In addition to a series of entrepreneur forums, the signing ceremony of cooperation projects was also held during this year's annual meeting. The projects focus on key areas, such as the digital economy, bioeconomy, snow-and-ice economy, new energy, high-end equipment, aerospace and new materials. A total of 125 projects were signed, with a total contract value of about 94 billion yuan ($13.23 billion).