China Unveils AI-Software Integration Plan, Aiming to Cover 20,000 Software Firms by 2028

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued an action plan for integrating AI with software. The plan aims to significantly raise the intelligence level of the software and IT services industry by 2028, cultivate high-level smart programming tools and platforms, and promote their use across 20,000 large software firms. It also targets 100 smart upgrade projects for software companies and 100 benchmark agent software applications in key industries.

The plan calls for optimizing smart programming tools, developing agent-driven coding tools, and integrating them with code hosting platforms, cloud services, and open-source communities. It also urges faster smart upgrades for software firms, encouraging investment in smart programming and prioritizing companies with strong results.

For foundational software, the plan supports smart upgrades for operating systems and databases in areas like agent scheduling and performance tuning. It promotes deep AI integration with industrial software such as CAD, CAE, and EDA. For agent software, it requires research on engineering technologies and development of general-purpose and industry-specific agent software.

The plan also encourages open-source contributions, guiding firms to share smart programming and agent achievements, and calls for key standards development, including maturity assessments for smart programming and agent interface standards.