automation

Workers in China are living through the fastest AI adoption drive on earth. Enterprise use of AI models and agents jumped from 9.6% to 47.5% in a single year, Beijing’s AI Plus plan targets 90% penetration by 2030, and programmers, scriptwriters and translators are already losing work to the tools their employers adopted. This article follows the Associated Press reporting on three workers who lived through it, sets their stories against the verified numbers — youth unemployment at 17.9%, a record 12.7 million graduates, 54% of the world’s industrial robot installations — and draws out what China’s adapt-or-be-replaced moment means for businesses everywhere else.