A visitor plays weiqi, or Go, with SenseTime's AI Go robot at the fifth China International Consumer Products Expo in Haikou, Hainan province, in April. [Photo/Xinhua]

Chinese artificial intelligence pioneer SenseTime is accelerating its global expansion strategy, in line with China's rising prominence in worldwide AI innovation.

Jeff Shi, president of SenseTime Asia Pacific, said: "Capitalizing on new opportunities centered around Chinese innovation, SenseTime consistently relies on local talent, collaborates with local partners and builds local ecosystems."

According to Shi, the company now operates in 11 markets across the Asia-Pacific region, achieving a remarkable fivefold increase in long-term customers over the past three years. Shi highlighted the strong growth potential as visual AI converges with generative AI.

Traditionally known for its computer vision technology widely used in areas such as autonomous driving and smart city management, SenseTime has quickly leveraged its more than ten years of AI research and development to build its own AI large language model.

In July, a distinguished 39-member tech delegation, led by Hong Seok-Hyun, chairman and CEO of JoongAng Group, the largest media group in South Korea, visited Sense-Time's Shanghai headquarters. The delegation's visit focused on understanding SenseTime's advancements in visual AI and multimodal large language models, exploring significant potential for bilateral technological cooperation.

Hong emphasized the inseparable link between AI and China. "You cannot discuss AI without mentioning China, and you cannot discuss China without mentioning AI."

According to Hong, SenseTime has not only excelled in computer vision, but also demonstrated profound technical accumulation and significant progress in the field of multimodal large models, which is deeply impressive.

Hong said he hopes this visit will provide a deeper understanding of China's latest developments and experience in related fields, enhance mutual understanding and cooperation, jointly address the challenges brought by global technological transformation and achieve mutual benefits.

Having entered the South Korean market in 2019, SenseTime said it has established long-term, stable partnerships with over 50 local clients across diverse sectors including smart buildings, finance, the internet and robotics.

Apart from South Korea, Southeast Asian countries are also showing surging interest in China's AI innovation. Shi from SenseTime said: "We have received dozens of overseas delegations to our headquarters this year. For Southeast Asian countries, a fast way to develop AI innovation is to come to Shanghai every week."

Previously, Asian countries tended to flock to the United States to see the most pioneering innovation, but now China has also become a must-see destination for them, Shi added.

According to Shi, the Shanghai government has created a business-friendly environment, focusing on high-tech industries like semiconductors and AI, providing talent and facilitating business growth.

"A lot of things SenseTime has done are just monumental. The 10-year AI journey has provided us with insights into the challenges and rewards of AI adoption. We look forward to sharing these learnings with more enterprise customers, both at home and abroad," Shi said.

Demonstrating its cutting-edge capabilities, SenseTime unveiled its upgraded "SenseNova V6.5" multimodal foundation model system earlier this month. Key advancements include strong reasoning. The company claimed that its text-image multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning matches top models like Gemini 2.5 Pro from Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Claude Sonnet 4 from US AI startup Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon.

SenseNova V6.5 also features high efficiency, with its optimized multimodal architecture offering over three times cost-performance improvement over its predecessor, the company said.

Complementing this, SenseTime's core product, Raccoon AI, underwent a significant upgrade, evolving into a comprehensive co-pilot. Moving beyond traditional AI assistance, Raccoon AI proactively handles core tasks through precise questioning and user confirmation, enabling collaborative workflows akin to human colleagues.

Raccoon AI is rapidly penetrating industries with tailored versions. The education edition of Raccoon can intelligently analyze student performance, course effectiveness and learning patterns. It has been deployed in more than 500 institutions across over 10 scenarios serving more than 250,000 teachers and students. It boosts learning efficiency by 15-30 percent and increases classroom participation by 2.1 times, SenseTime added.

In July, a State Council executive meeting approved a guideline on implementing the "AI Plus" initiative in China, calling for vigorously advancing the large-scale commercial application of AI and boosting its accelerated popularization and deep integration across various fields of economic and social development.