Breaking Spatial Barriers, Longfor Qiding Unlocks the Physical World with AI
In the era of technological explosion, innovation is the greatest source of vitality.
Recently, the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce released the 2026 list of invention patents held by private enterprises. Among them, automaker Seres leads Chongqing with 1,720 valid domestic invention patents, followed by Longfor Group and Huabang Life Health taking the second and third places respectively.
R&D investment and the number of patents act as a mirror, reflecting the strength, potential and attitude towards the new wave. As the carrier of cutting-edge technologies, intelligent vehicles are already at the forefront of technological development. For example, Elon Musk himself refers to Tesla as an "AI + robotics" company.
Longfor Group, which ranks right after them, is a time-honored real estate enterprise originating from Chongqing.
Compared with intelligent vehicles, the public used to have no intuitive perception of spatial technology. People's intelligent experience of houses mostly comes from the upgrading and stacking of a wide variety of small home appliances. "Smart home" is the general term for these life "plugins", and the house has only served as a container carrying technologies from beginning to end.
As a pioneer in transformation, Longfor took the lead in the industry to take a step forward, accumulating abundant technological achievements in the fields of spatial intelligence, digital operation and AI agents, and accelerating the transformation to technology and data-driven development.
Nowadays, AI has reconstructed production relations, the traditional development model is approaching its end, and real estate enterprises inevitably need to find a way out for further development.
Longfor's presence at the top of this list, in itself, may be an answer.
01
Restructuring the underlying architecture from scratch
The last technological explosion can be traced back to more than ten years ago.
In 2014, with the popularization of mobile Internet and the booming concept of smart communities, a large number of emerging digital products emerged, such as visual contactless access control, constant-temperature and constant-humidity indoor air conditioning systems, as well as online service processes. At that time, real estate enterprises were in urgent need of a mobile entry point to connect the rapid implementation of technological terminals.
Longfor's digital and intelligent transformation started at this time. While integrating various service resources such as access control and property management online, the enterprise took two extra steps forward.
First of all, based on Internet of Things technology, Longfor installed a large number of sensors in buildings, so that any movement in every corner of the space can be captured at any time. For example, in a 100,000-square-meter Tianjie Mall, Longfor needs to install 15,000 to 20,000 IoT devices to ensure that the operation data and health status of facilities can be collected in real time.
In the following years, Longfor took the second step, building digital twin capabilities based on forward BIM technology. This capability allows a complete building to be constructed in the digital world before the actual construction of the project, with every pipeline precisely modeled without errors.
With the capability to connect the virtual and real worlds, Longfor has stepped into the field of spatial technology. Many previously unsolvable pain points in the real estate industry now have new solutions.
For example, in the past, abnormal equipment during the operation period was found through a large number of manual inspections, and energy consumption fluctuations required meetings for review and analysis, which was both laborious and time-consuming. With an AI intelligent control solution for cooling stations, Longfor can reduce the comprehensive energy consumption of the refrigeration system by more than 15%, saving 500,000 kWh of electricity annually for a 100,000-square-meter Tianjie Mall.
For projects under construction, there is a huge gap between 2D drawings and the 3D world, and projects have long suffered from high design change rates. Through digital twin technology, Longfor "builds" the project once on the computer first, all design problems are exposed in advance, and the change rate during the construction process is reduced to about 1%. For a 100-billion-yuan project, this single measure alone can save hundreds of millions of yuan in real costs.
After completing these two steps, the third thing Longfor did was to incubate an enterprise called Qiuding Intelligence with the massive data generated along with cutting-edge technologies.
Qiuding Intelligence is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Longfor, a "specialized, refined, differential and innovative" enterprise, and also a highly expected platform for digital and intelligent transformation. To help Qiuding move further, Longfor has invested tens of billions of yuan in the past few years.
Qiuding Intelligence is a specialized, refined, differential and innovative enterprise incubated by Longfor, and also a highly promising platform for Longfor's digital and intelligent transformation. Behind it is Longfor's cumulative investment of over 10 billion yuan in the technology sector over more than ten years.
The building data accumulated by Longfor based on digital infrastructure over the past ten years has been transformed into AI agents through Qiuding Intelligence. For example, the energy consumption diagnosis Agent of Longfor Tianjie can independently judge abnormal energy use. When a merchandiser says "find the light boxes on B1 floor that have been vacant for more than 60 days", the space will give the corresponding answer.
Up to now, Qiuding has accumulated more than 800 technical patents. When AI and digital intelligence capabilities covering the whole cycle of construction, property management and asset management are aggregated in one enterprise, Qiuding has the ability to build a brand new underlying architecture for most physical spaces.
In recent years, the intelligent upgrading of automobiles largely relies on the reconstruction of the underlying architecture of electrical and electronic systems, and the implementation of domain controllers and central computing hardware architecture, which unblocks the overall computing power and data flow, and finally realizes new functions such as today's "autonomous driving system" and "in-vehicle infotainment control system".
Qiuding's slogan is "Committed to bringing AI into the real world". Its practice in physical spaces is exactly a repetition of the idea of intelligent transformation of automobiles.
02
Building the "Intelligent Driving System" for Spaces
Not long ago, Qiuding launched two new-generation spatial AI products, "Nebula AI" and "Terra OS".
Among them, Nebula AI can realize the autonomous learning and evolution of physical spaces, making the spatial experience safer, more efficient, more energy-saving and more comfortable; Terra OS provides AI intelligent solutions based on data algorithms for the construction and operation process of the whole space cycle.
The former connects every device and every inch of space in the building, identifies risks earlier, responds and disposes quickly, and gradually gains the capability of autonomous operation, making buildings safer, more efficient, more energy-saving and more comfortable; the latter supports the cost, value and operation of projects, helping managers clarify costs, judge values, discover operational problems, and provide basis for decision-making.
Since then, the most traditional physical space finally has its own "autonomous driving system" and "smart cockpit".
As two major terminals in daily life, houses have long been unable to complete digital and intelligent transformation like automobiles, due to the lack of accurate underlying data.
The great differences between buildings and houses, coupled with the highly personalized characteristics of user behaviors, make it difficult for this industry to collect data through standardized factory delivery like complete vehicles. The architectural structure, equipment brands and personnel flow patterns of different buildings vary greatly, which makes the originally easily accessible operation data extremely costly to obtain.
Longfor's layout of digital and intelligent transformation has taken the lead in turning business data from "sunk cost" into usable "growth assets". Over the past decade, massive sensors have recorded the changes and results corresponding to each operation, as well as feedback from customers, energy and other ports; the cloud central hub analyzes, processes, judges the data, eliminates the dross and preserves the essence, and stores them properly.
Qiuding's underlying database was established in this way.
At present, Longfor has more than 2,000 projects and nearly 100 shopping malls across the country, and massive data is still generated every day, coming from architectural space layout, equipment operation conditions, pedestrian flow activities, energy consumption load, environmental sensors and so on. In the past, the tacit experience and practical skills that could only be passed down through "mentoring" have now been turned into calibrated real operation data.
Qiuding trains and iterates its own AI with these accurate data. Taking video AI inspection as an example, both the algorithm accuracy and recall rate exceed 95%, covering more than 120 intelligent recognition scenarios.
Just as autonomous driving systems and smart cockpit systems can make driving smooth and comfortable, the biggest beneficiary is the driver himself - there is no need to distract to operate the buttons on the central control panel for family members, and even the boring driving process has new solutions.
Qiuding is also trying to liberate managers.
Massive data is gathered from all corners of the building, and presented to managers in a simple and intuitive form through data analysis, text processing and image processing by the AI central hub. Managers only need to give judgments and goals accordingly, and the remaining strategies and execution can be completed by AI itself.
03
Prioritize spatial revolution, then promote industry transformation
For real estate enterprises standing at the crossroads, the exploration of Longfor and Qiuding also points out a feasible path.
Traditional real estate enterprises that have benefited from land dividends and financial dividends are facing the biggest problem of fundamental changes in profit structure. The gross profit of traditional development business has been greatly compressed, and the income from holding commercial properties and office buildings does not come from one-time sales, which extremely relies on value preservation and appreciation brought by asset operation. That is to say, the profits of real estate enterprises are entirely derived from cost saving and operation efficiency improvement.
In Japan's retail industry, MUJI has a famous saying "reasonable low price", which means to remove unnecessary links without affecting quality, so as to achieve better price and cost performance.
What Qiuding provides for the industry is exactly a reasonable way to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This system, which is derived from Longfor's internal practices and verified by a large number of cases, has predictable and quantifiable operation results.
Supported by Qiuding's system, the manpower efficiency ratio of Longfor's property scenarios and commercial spaces has reached the top level of the industry. In recent years, group-level industrial parks, urban service providers, financial institutions and Internet enterprises have all become Qiuding's customers.
For example, a national industrial park group with business all over the country has more than 400 parks scattered across different regions. In the past, data had to be reported layer by layer, and equipment inspection required inspectors to travel back and forth, leading to uneven management levels among different parks. Qiuding connects all these parks to the same screen: equipment status is transmitted back in real time, abnormal situations are displayed on the screen within seconds, and problems found by video AI will automatically find the corresponding personnel to handle them. Now, the work order processing efficiency has increased by 62.5%, and the per capita managed area has increased by 1.4 times.
In the parks of a national health and wellness industry group across the country, two things are most feared: one is that no one knows the abnormal situation immediately when it occurs, and the other is that energy consumption is lost unconsciously. Qiuding connects all facilities and equipment to the same network: alarm information is sent to on-duty personnel in real time, and control modes can be issued with one click. Now, 3 central control rooms with 54 screens are managing all parks across the country. Each park saves 1.5 million yuan a year, and the equipment fault handling efficiency increases by 80%.
Now, Qiuding's operation is accelerating faster and faster. Qiuding continuously precipitates the operation experience of thousands of Longfor projects into technical services, which continuously provides fuel for the self-accelerating upgrading of Qiuding's spatial AI. Customers choose Qiuding not only for its technology, but also for the truly valuable industry "know-how" precipitated in this system.
In the AI era, the iteration still relies on "human experience".
From past cases, when a physical terminal finds a path for in-depth digital and intelligent upgrading, the pace of industry transformation often presents exponential changes, especially when the upgrading can bring advantages in cost, efficiency and experience in commercial competition.
The same is true for household appliances and intelligent vehicles. Longfor and Qiuding, who are at the forefront of spatial intelligence, also have great opportunities to write a new story of development with this advantage.
In fact, the start of spatial digital intelligence is not too late. After all, it has only been five years since the first generation of HarmonyOS Cockpit and ADS 1.0 were released.