‘Token economy’ emerging as AI use soars in China, experts tell conference

Chinese tech industry experts say the rapidly increasing use of AI tokens is giving rise to a token-based economy, with the tiny units underpinning artificial intelligence services evolving beyond a technical metric and into the basis for delivering and pricing AI services. “The [Chinese] digital economy has gone through the stages of the data economy and the computing economy. Today, the token economy is emerging,” Yin Hao, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on Wednesday while delivering a keynote speech at the China Internet Conference in Beijing. Tokens are the fundamental units that AI models use to process and generate information. They are also the building blocks that underpin tasks ranging from chatbot conversations to image and film-quality video production. Yin said tokens were more than just a technical metric, and had become a new production factor that connected AI model capability, computing resources and commercial value. AI token usage has risen rapidly in China, with daily AI token consumption surging more than 1,000-fold in just over two years, rising from around 100 billion tokens a day at the start of 2024 to 100 trillion by the end of last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Daily usage exceeded 140 trillion tokens in March, equivalent to roughly 100,000 tokens per person based on the country’s population of about 1.4 billion. The surge in AI token usage comes as companies across the country increasingly adopt AI to boost productivity and automate business operations. China Unicom viewed “token operation” as an important driver of efficiency across its businesses, company vice-president Qiu Baohua said in a speech at the conference. Qiu said Unicom’s growing AI token consumption mirrored the expanding use of AI across its business. The token economy is the greatest opportunity we can be certain of in an otherwise uncertain era Wang Lei, Huawei Technologies AI agents had improved document drafting and contract retrieval efficiency by 70 per cent, he said, while AI now handled more than 85 per cent of calls to Unicom’s 10010 customer service hotline, reducing annual operating costs by more than 100 million yuan (US$14 million). Other industry leaders also expressed optimism about the burgeoning token economy, with Huawei Technologies vice-president Wang Lei, who heads its data communication products line, saying the company “believes the token economy is the greatest opportunity we can be certain of in an otherwise uncertain era”. The three-day conference, hosted by the Internet Society of China, a government-backed industry association, began on Wednesday. With Beijing increasingly promoting AI and its integration across traditional industries, this year’s conference is focusing heavily on the emerging technology, with sessions on AI’s role in developing new quality productive forces, advances in AI agents and safety, as well as the coordinated development of computing infrastructure and energy systems. Other topics on the agenda include the digital economy, online culture and content governance, cybersecurity and data governance, reflecting China’s broader push to strengthen its digital economy while accelerating the adoption of AI.