TIANJIN -- The sixth World Intelligence Congress (WIC), a major artificial intelligence (AI) event in China, kicked off in North China's Tianjin municipality on Friday.

The two-day event, with the theme of "New Era of Intelligence: Digitalization Drives Growth, Intelligence Wins Future," will display the latest achievements in the intelligence industry at an exhibition area of 3,000 square meters.

A total of 30 parallel forums will be held online, focusing on cutting-edge technologies such as XR, AI, 3D and motion capture.

Since its inauguration in 2017, the event has offered a platform for scientists, entrepreneurs and economists from home and abroad to discuss the frontier trends of intelligence technologies.

At the event this year, entrepreneurs and economists said that the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation represented by artificial intelligence will reconstruct the global innovation map and reshape the global economic structure.

Zhou Ji, director of China's National Manufacturing Strategy Advisory Committee, said the application of the new generation of artificial intelligence technology will promote the deep integration of advanced manufacturing and modern service industries, and will boost the fundamental transformation of the manufacturing industry from the product-oriented model to user-oriented model.

Data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed that the scale of the global artificial intelligence industry has reached $156.5 billion in 2020.

The current scale of China's artificial intelligence core industry has exceeded 400 billion yuan (about $59.7 billion), with over 3,000 enterprises, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

"The current 'digitization' is equivalent to the 'electrification' about a century ago," said Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, adding that "China is still in the earliest stage of digitization, and the dividends have not been fully released."