China keeps a current record.

Executive summary

A current, cited record

Readiness 60 of 100, range 53-67. Visibility 40.9 of 100 across 216 scored companies.

A low score here reflects the public record, not a company’s capability. China is among the record leaders: of the five signals the index reads, its record leans hardest on freshness and authority and thinnest on capability visibility. The conditions companies here operate under score 60, and what those companies publish scores 40.9. Of the two, the second is the one companies here control, and the quicker to change: 93% of the 216 companies with enough of a public trail to score publish no proof of capability at all.

What companies in China publish is recent and it gets cited. The 15 that also publish proof of capability average 67 of 100.

Why visibility is the asset

Invisible is not the same as absent

Buyers, investors and partners treat it that way. Most decisions about a company are shaped before anyone is contacted, from what they can find. The record is the only version of it most people ever meet. and here most of the market already leaves one, which moves the question from whether a record exists to what it says about capability. In China, 106 of 335 companies screened leave too little behind to assess, which is the addressable group rather than the verdict.

Where the signal is strong

China’s strongest and weakest public signals

The five signals are not on one scale. Nearly every company in the index is discoverable and nearly none publishes proof of what it can do, so the longest bar below is a property of the index before it is a property of China. Read against its own other four signals, this record leans hardest on freshness and authority and thinnest on capability visibility. The first is where companies here have already shown they can publish; the second is where the same effort has not yet gone, and it is the clearest place to start.

Four tiers of visibility

Four tiers, and where companies in China sit

A tier is a position in the published regional ranking, not a grade anyone awards. It says how much of a company’s AI work a buyer or an investor can verify, and nothing at all about whether that work is any good.

2 of the 216 companies in China that clear the threshold reach tier 1, and 150 are emerging, 69% of those scored. Emerging is the normal state of the region, and the group standing closest to the tier above.

Limits and what this is not

What this report does not claim

Printed with the findings rather than in an appendix at the back.

What to do with a visibility score

A visibility score is something a company here can move, because every signal behind it is something it already controls. Three steps separate it from a record that shows what it is actually doing.

Macau has no benchmark block and is reported as contextual. The dossier counts companies on a wider definition than this page does and the two reconcile: how the company counts fit together.