On September 10, at the opening main forum of the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Conference, Zhang Hongjiang, a venture partner at Source Code Capital and an external member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, stated that the AI new economy will transform corporate organizational forms. He believes that with the development of AI technology, new requirements have been put forward for future organizational structures. The core competitiveness of enterprises in the future lies in their ability to convert enterprise IP, know-how, user relationships, and product capabilities into models, enabling these models to generate emergence (Emergence) effects.
In 2025, Zhang Hongjiang elaborated on the concepts of Agent Swarm and Agent Economy at the Bund Conference. And 2026 is a further deepening of the above views. The Bund Conference has become a window for observing the development trajectory of the AI new economy.
In his presentation titled "Artificial Intelligence Accelerating Evolution: Three Observations on the Development of Large Models," he pointed out that from a technical perspective, AI is the fastest technological wave in human history, with the intelligence test results of cutting-edge AI models exceeding the average human level. At the same time, AI's recursive self-improvement capability further enables AI to form a self-sustaining cycle between the physical world and the virtual world, demonstrating an unprecedented acceleration.
Technical breakthroughs have led to new forms in the economic field: from Agent to Agent Economy, that is, a network of economic relationships among multiple Agents. Zhang Hongjiang summarized a notable evolutionary path: "Agent Evolution: From conversation to assistant, from passive to active, from individual to group."
He believes that the agent economy is essentially a Token economy, but different Tokens have different values. "The most valuable Token is equivalent to our new Maotai; users should choose the right Maotai, not just ordinary liquor."
In the Agent Economy stage, due to the shift of the main character from humans to Agents, a series of changes follow. For example, in the software field, it is moving from "people using software" to "Agents using software." Zhang Hongjiang believes that the Agent Economy has essentially brought about a paradigm shift.
However, the transformation of software is not the end of AI's value. Zhang Hongjiang said that more attention should be paid to AI's impact on the "organizational structure" level. He stated that in the Agent Economy era, enterprises need to re-recognize significant changes. For example, under the production model of OPC, the organizational form of "one person + multiple Agents" has further miniaturized company sizes.
At the same time, enterprises not only need to focus on traditional assets but should also include enterprise know-how, proprietary models, computing power, high-quality data, Agent collaboration systems, and sustainable improvement workflows. He pointed out that "the core competitiveness of enterprises in the future lies in their ability to convert enterprise IP, know-how, user relationships, and product capabilities into models, and enable these models to generate emergence (Emergence) effects."
In the field of science and technology, "emergence" refers to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. A large number of simple individuals, through local interactions, spontaneously generate new characteristics, structures, or behaviors at the macro level that individual entities do not possess.
On the morning of September 10, the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Conference, themed "Co-Creating the AI New Economy," was opened in the Huangpu Expo Park in Shanghai. Focusing on how AI can be transformed into new productivity and new economic opportunities, and allowing more people to share the growth dividends brought by technological progress.
