From exhibition group to ecosystem: Beijing AI “system capabilities” revealed by WAIC 2026

Smart Things Author | Wang Han Editor | Mo Ying On July 20, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC 2026 came to a successful conclusion. Shanghai World Expo, Zhangjiang and West Bund have "three places and four pavilions", more than 1,100 companies, over 100,000 square meters of exhibition area, more than 4,480 exhibits, and nearly 400 world premiere products... The scale of WAIC 2026 has set a new record in the past. In addition to numbers, a signal that deserves more attention is the change in the direction of the industry: at this AI event, people no longer pay attention to parameters and architecture as usual, but are more asking "Has it been implemented?" "Can I use it in my life?" According to statistics, at WAIC 2026, there were more than 170 exhibitors and innovative entities (including well-known universities, associations, laboratories, etc.) registered in Beijing, and their fields covered almost the entire artificial intelligence industry chain. Why are companies in Beijing the first to come up with products that can be mass-produced, commercially used, and deployed at this WAIC with the theme of "implementation"? The answer is not limited to the efforts of the enterprise itself, but also points to a deeper proposition: How does this city use systematic institutional design to efficiently transform technological potential into industrial kinetic energy? 1. At WAIC 2026, the "Beijing Paradigm" of AI is taking shape on the large-scale model track, and "whether acceptable task results can be delivered" has become the new evaluation coordinate. At this WAIC conference, leading AI model companies from Beijing such as Baidu, Zero One Thousand Things, and Wall-Facing Intelligence all appeared. Baidu Intelligent Cloud's general-purpose intelligent agent "Baidu Tazi" was selected as the "treasure of the town hall". It can independently disassemble the steps, call tools, and complete the entire process delivery of file processing, data analysis, and PPT production. ▲Baidu booth The end-to-end model of wall-facing intelligence will be launched on Samsung mobile phones. At the conference, it open sourced the first embodied intelligence series model MiniCPM-Robot, in which the general VLA model parameters are only 1.5B, achieving 3-