2026 is regarded as the "Year of one-person company." This year's Global Internet Competition "Straight to Wuzhen" also added an OPC special track for the first time, setting up three tracks: the digital business operations, content innovation, and service empowerment group. Focusing on AI-native innovation, it encourages and develops innovation and entrepreneurship in the AI era, with more than 100 entities actively participating.
With the support of AI tools, the barriers to content creation, product development, business growth, customer service, and others have been significantly lowered. Zhang Li, co-president of Asia Data Group, said that there are three types of businesses suitable for the OPC model: vertical niche AI tools and SaaS digital products, digital content innovation businesses, and light digital business services and cross-border digital operations. AI has greatly reduced the cost of product development and material production, but the real moat of OPC comes from the founder's industry knowledge and creativity; AI is more like a virtual team, amplifying one person's capabilities several times over.
According to data from the "2026 China OPC Industry White Paper," as of June 2025, the stock of OPCs in China had exceeded 16 million, with one out of every three newly registered enterprises being an "OPC".
Zhang stated that there are also three types of businesses that still cannot do without a complete team: hard-tech hardware, intelligent manufacturing, and embodied intelligent robots; large B-end industry solution projects; and strong-security and strong-compliance tracks. One-person companies are very suitable for idea validation and for proving out the business model from 0 to 1, but when scaling from 1 to 10, most projects still need to move toward team-based operation.
As OPC moves from "being able to make it" to "being able to go far," comprehensive capabilities have become the new watershed.
Head of Innovation & Technology Advisory Board JEUNE to China, Christian Henricson, said the biggest difference between Europe and China isn't talent or tooling, it's the environment around deployment: how each region structures compliance, capital, and market access.
To stand out in international competition, OPC founders need not only to master AI tools, but also to possess compliance literacy, ecosystem integration capabilities, verifiable trust and authentic intellectual property and operational leverage. The OPC model offers advantages of lower capital barriers, agility across jurisdictions, and a global stage without a global office. But it rewards judgment and domain expertise, not just tools. The threshold for OPC today is no longer "do you have a company," but "do you have talent, and a real solution that actually solves a problem."
Zhu Jingyi contributed to this story.
