A parallel forum of the Guangzhou International Innovation Festival took place at the Guangzhou Library in Tianhe district on Dec 18-20. The forum focused on innovation-driven new industrialization.

The fourth industrial revolution is currently underway, said He Xiaolong, deputy director of the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, during the parallel forum.

He thought that "integration" should be the theme of current developments, such as the integration of information technology and industrial technology, the integration of the physical world and the virtual world, and the integration of data elements and the real economy.

He Xiaolong delivers a speech during the parallel forum. [Photo by Xu Wenwen/Guangzhou Daily]

"China is advancing the deep integration of the manufacturing industry with new-generation information technologies, such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain, thus promoting a new type of industrialization," He added.

According to Minesh Pore, co-founder and CEO of BuvHive, the rapid development of AI has created three new needs: predictive analysis of demands, automation of inventory management, and geopolitical risk management.

Zhou Yaling, the chief industry architect for industrial digitalization at Huawei Cloud, introduced Huawei's practices in helping small and medium-sized enterprises with their digital transformation.

"Over the past five or six years, Huawei has worked with local governments to build three digital transformation promotion centers, including a capability center, a joint innovation center and an ecological center," Zhou said. He added that Huawei has also proposed a new paradigm for cloud factories to solve the structural capacity problems faced by SMEs.