Outside the spotlight: traditional industries adopting AI faster than expected
A Chinese-language feature interviews more than ten practitioners from non-tech sectors and profiles five cases: a Foshan pig-farming-supplies owner who used AI to generate leads, move his company to the cloud and rewrite a decade-old software product; a Shanghai Jiao Tong team building AI scheduling and decision systems for manufacturers; a recent graduate who turned month-end reconciliation into an agentic workflow; and a county physics teacher and an equipment-rental owner using AI for interactive courseware and quotes. It reports that Muyuan, described as the world's largest pig producer, built a pig-farming model with Alibaba Cloud that distils veteran vets' disease-diagnosis experience into one-second results deployed across more than 1,000 farms. The article cites CAICT, McKinsey and MIT NANDA survey figures to argue the real obstacles are fragmented data, customer education and cross-department authority rather than the models themselves.
A reminder that measurable AI returns may surface in unglamorous back-office and field workflows rather than frontier demos, though the piece's evidence is largely anecdotal and its subjects are pseudonymous.