Hisense, a major Chinese home appliance and consumer electronics manufacturer, saw one of its television manufacturing plants — a digital facility centered on user needs and end-to-end AI-enabled manufacturing — named the world's first lighthouse factory in the television sector on Thursday, a move that reflects China's ongoing shift toward smart manufacturing.

A lighthouse factory is a designation introduced by the World Economic Forum for benchmark manufacturing facilities that lead the global industry in digitalization, intelligent manufacturing and lean production.

Hisense integrates AI across its entire value chain — from R&D to delivery — by leveraging advanced applications that combine intelligent agents, big data, virtual reality, and digital simulation. This enables enhanced efficiency, quality, and manufacturing flexibility.

For instance, automated precision panel fitting is enabled by robots equipped with multiple high-precision vision cameras and an AI system, allowing the process — from film removal and precise assembly to real-time calibration — to run automatically, with positioning accuracy of around 0.1 millimeters.

In R&D, Hisense has rolled out an intelligent agent platform powered by large language models, featuring four agents focused on assisted coding, system integration, defect analysis and use-case design. In process design, it has deployed an AI-enabled digital workflow, integrated with its self-developed Xinghai large model, to drive efficiency gains.