ICIF Highlights, Embodied Work Goes Mainstream

From May 21 to 25, the 22nd China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair (ICIF) was successfully held at the Shenzhen World Exhibition and Convention Center. This edition coincided with the opening year of the 15th Five-Year Plan and the year China hosts APEC, arriving at a pivotal moment of close international economic, trade, and technological exchange.As the only national-level, international, and comprehensive cultural industry expo in China, the ICIF brought together more than 6,000 exhibitors from around the world and was expected to attract 130,000 professional visitors from home and abroad. Closely tracking the digital and intelligent transformation of cultural industries and the development of new quality productive forces, the fair worked to build an international bridge for cultural exports and technology exchange and cooperation.

Leveraging the ICIF as an international showcase platform, DexForce Technology — a benchmark technology enterprise of the “Cultural and Creative China” initiative and a domestic leader in the commercial deployment of general embodied AI — presented to the world the frontier technologies and hardcore innovation strength of homegrown general-purpose humanoid robots. At this edition, DexForce brought its “AI + commercial services” integrated solution, with the self-developed DexForce W1 Pro general-purpose embodied AI robot as its core carrier, comprehensively demonstrating the full-chain empowerment of embodied AI across cultural tourism and retail scenarios.

At the fair, the DexForce W1 Pro chess robot made its official debut, squaring off against on-site visitors for the first time and calmly taking on every challenger. The playful human-robot interaction gave everyone an up-close feel for the unique charm of intelligent technology meeting the traditional national pastime of xiangqi.

Powered by Engine-driven Sim2Real VLA, the DexForce W1 Pro chess robot runs stably and resists interference, sustaining long stretches of continuous play. Its vision-only binocular perception system recognizes the board state in real time and uploads it to the embodied AI brain, which reasons over the position and plans its strategy; piece recognition and localization accuracy reaches 99.8%, with every move placed precisely. The robot also carries a self-developed multimodal interaction model that supports two-way voice and visual interaction, so it can easily chat with on-site visitors about game strategy and chess insights.

Beyond the chess matches, the DexForce W1 Pro ice cream robot kiosk set up on site drew huge crowds and became a hot photo spot at the fair. Even at the peak of ICIF foot traffic, the intelligent ice cream robot operated fully autonomously, accurately recognizing online orders, completing utensil pickup through high-precision visual localization, quickly finishing ice cream preparation and service, with high efficiency and stable operation, effectively shortening waiting times for visitors and bringing a convenient, novel consumer experience.

The booth also rolled out a fun blind-box activity, once again demonstrating the operational prowess of the robot. After visitors drew colored balls from the raffle box, the robot quickly identified the colors through its vision-only system, precisely picked the matching blind-box gifts, and delivered them into the hands of visitors, fully demonstrating end-to-end working capability from intelligent perception and autonomous decision-making to precise execution. With the rich variety of on-site deployment scenarios of DexForce W1 Pro and its stable, reliable performance, it earned broad acclaim from visitors and attracted many business guests to gather at the booth for in-depth exchanges on technical applications and cooperation intentions.

With its rich application scenarios and stable performance, DexForce W1 Pro won wide acclaim from on-site visitors and attracted numerous partners for business discussions. Meanwhile, its eye-catching commercial results gained high recognition across the industry: DexForce Technology was successively featured on CCTV Xinwen Lianbo and the CCTV Finance program Zhengdian Caijing, and accepted interviews from several mainstream media outlets, with its technical strength and deployment results becoming the focus of the coverage.

During the same period, DexForce Technology held an operator signing ceremony, successfully signing on site with Zhongyi (Shenzhen) Embodied AI Technology Co., Ltd., Xingkong Yinli (Shenzhen) Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., Shaanxi Hairong Culture and Tourism Industry Group Co., Ltd., and Guangdong Dadao Zhichuang Technology Co., Ltd., among other companies. With a growing number of operators actively joining the partnership, this momentum fully validates the feasibility and core deployment value of the “AI + commercial services” operating model. Looking ahead, DexForce Technology will keep deepening collaboration with its partners to achieve win-win development.

During the recently concluded May Day golden week, DexForce Technology achieved a concentrated showcase and large-scale commercial deployment in cultural tourism, working hand in hand with operators from multiple regions to open robotic commercial service kiosks at K11 in Shenzhen, Elephant Trunk Hill in Guilin, West Street in Yangshuo, and Xuzhou Fantawild and other cultural tourism landmarks and premium commercial districts, rolling out 10+ robotic commercial service kiosks in total. The deployment delivered remarkable results: total holiday revenue per kiosk reached RMB 100K+, a 4.6x uplift over traditional stores; visitor-to-purchase conversion hit 99%; the fastest payback period was only 6 months; and flagship scenic-area kiosks lifted surrounding foot traffic by 200%.

Anchored in the “DexBot Inside” strategy, DexForce Technology takes its self-developed generative embodied AI brain as the core, breaks away from a single hardware-sales model, and outputs cross-category, cross-scenario enabling capabilities to partners — continuously injecting new momentum into commercial retail and cultural tourism consumption scenarios and driving embodied AI technology toward commercial value conversion.