The Yunnan provincial government has officially released its implementation plan focused on expanding capacity and enhancing quality within the services industry. This strategic document outlines a comprehensive approach across three key areas: boosting digital information service supply, strengthening technology-driven empowerment of industrial upgrades, and advancing the digital-intelligent transformation of the services sector itself. These measures aim to cultivate new productive forces and create fresh economic growth points, positioning the services sector as a primary engine for the province's high-quality socioeconomic development.

Strengthening the Digital Foundation to Elevate Comprehensive Service Capabilities

The implementation plan designates digital information as one of the three priority areas for producer services development, building on Yunnan's unique comparative advantages. The initiative focuses on software, information transmission, data services, and information technology to enhance digital information service supply and establish a solid infrastructure for the "Digital Yunnan" initiative. Specific actions include launching an "Artificial Intelligence+" initiative, fully utilizing the Kunming international communication business gateway, promoting 5G-Advanced and mobile IoT construction, and cultivating the "green electricity + intelligent computing" model while exploring cross-border data processing patterns.

These targeted measures are designed to drive deep integration of next-generation information technology with the services sector, continuously generating new digital scenarios, business formats, and models. The ultimate goal is to strengthen innovation-driven momentum and transformation leadership, positioning Yunnan as a regional hub for international communication and digital services oriented toward South and Southeast Asia. Industry experts note that Yunnan uniquely combines geographic proximity to South and Southeast Asia with a national leadership position in green electricity resources. This policy strategically integrates these two advantages, addressing gaps in digital information service supply and transforming Yunnan from a mere transit point in digital corridors into a regional digital service hub with comprehensive supply chain capabilities.

Across the province, computing infrastructure construction continues to accelerate, with cross-border fiber optic cable capacity expanding on the China-Laos and China-Myanmar routes. New business forms such as minority language AI translation, cross-border e-commerce, and comprehensive cross-border data services are rapidly emerging. At the Yunsheng Cloud 5G Big Data Industrial Park, the Kunming AI Computing Center provides computational support to dozens of enterprises, driving new productive forces through the full chain from computing supply to industrial upgrades and enterprise innovation. The center has incubated multiple distinctive applications including smart healthcare and intelligent manufacturing, filling Yunnan's gap for large-scale, public, high-performance computing clusters.

China Telecom Yunnan is accelerating "computing-electricity collaboration" by connecting green-powered computing resources at its Liangya Data Center to the national "Xirang" computing network, offering users high-quality computing services at more accessible prices. China Mobile Yunnan has launched an AI computing service platform called "Token Factory" to meet diverse needs from daily office work to large-scale content production and customized industry development. Li Jing'an, General Manager of Cloud Network Development at China Telecom Yunnan, emphasized that the implementation plan precisely targets Yunnan's most distinctive comparative advantages. The company will expedite the operational launch of the Kunming international communication gateway, leverage the Liangya intelligent computing center's advantages, expand computing capacity, and accelerate new-generation communication network applications in industry, tourism, agriculture, and low-altitude economy scenarios.

Technology Services Empowerment Driving the Industry Toward Higher Value Chains

The deep integration of next-generation information technology with the services sector has become the core engine driving service industry development. Empowering high-quality services growth through technology is both an inherent requirement for cultivating new productive forces and a strategic measure for building a modern industrial system. The implementation plan focuses on four dimensions—R&D design, intellectual property, technology commercialization, and testing/certification—to bind technology services closely with the real economy. This addresses the long-standing challenges facing Yunnan's distinctive industries, which have remained large in scale but weak in competitiveness and limited in added value.

Experts suggest that while Yunnan boasts abundant resource endowments, much of its production remains in primary processing stages. By improving the complete technology services chain, the implementation plan effectively installs an innovation engine for featured industries, enabling premium Yunnan products to shift from selling resources to selling technology, standards, and brands. As an agricultural province, Yunnan is promoting deep integration of AI with plateau-featured agriculture, with research outcomes rapidly moving from laboratories to fields. Applications in tea, sugarcane, traditional Chinese medicine, and floriculture have significantly improved production efficiency, quality control, and green development levels.

Highland mountain crawler tea-picking robots can adapt to complex mountain tea garden environments, addressing labor shortages while improving fresh leaf picking quality. Combined applications of IoT, drone remote sensing, and AI algorithms enable intelligent identification and early warning of risks such as pests, drought, and nutrient imbalance. Through the smart tea garden project at Yunnan Agricultural University's Tea College, multiple digital tea garden demonstration bases have been established across major tea-producing regions including Pu'er, Lincang, and Xishuangbanna, effectively enhancing precision, standardization, and intelligence in tea garden management. Wang Baijuan, Dean of the Tea College at Yunnan Agricultural University, believes that "AI + agriculture" represents a systematic reshaping of the entire agricultural industry chain and serves as the core driver for cultivating new agricultural productive forces and advancing agricultural modernization. It has spawned new technology service formats such as intelligent management and smart monitoring, while also promoting integrated development of agricultural production and services.

Wang Baijuan noted that the implementation plan provides clear direction for technology services to empower featured industries in the province. She suggests further opening channels for industry-academia-research transformation to accelerate conversion of research value into industrial value; improving tiered promotion systems to lower barriers for digital technology adoption; and building collaborative mechanisms among universities, enterprises, and demonstration bases to create replicable models that bring technology services directly to the industrial frontlines.

Furthermore, the implementation plan proposes building provincial-level public platforms for AI-empowered services and implementing smart logistics empowerment projects for commerce and trade. These initiatives aim to comprehensively advance digital-intelligent transformation across the services sector, driving upgrades in livelihood services such as culture and tourism, community services, healthcare, and elderly care. By using digital technologies to restructure service industry operational models and service experiences, information barriers between service supply and consumption can be effectively removed, allowing more digital development dividends to benefit both enterprises and the public.