On October 14, 2026, the Artificial Intelligence Industry Conference kicked off in Jinan. This industry conference, which has been held for two consecutive years, moved out of Beijing for the first time this year and was held in Shandong Province.
This conference focuses on the empowerment of new industrialization through artificial intelligence, exploring how large models and intelligent agents can take root in the real economy and solve the practical challenges of transforming traditional manufacturing industries. The practical cases of many local manufacturing enterprises in Shandong have become a focal point for participants, and the large model of Lunan Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Lunan Pharmaceutical") is one of the representatives.
While many manufacturing enterprises are still in the conceptual pilot phase of leveraging AI, Lunan Pharmaceutical has already completed the transformation to AI from top-level strategic design to full-chain implementation.
Lunan Pharmaceutical originated from Tannan Pharmaceutical Factory, which was established in 1968. It was formally founded on December 14, 1995, and has become a comprehensive pharmaceutical group that integrates the research and development, production, and sales of traditional Chinese medicine, chemical drugs, and biological products. The group currently employs over 12,000 people. In 2025, the group paid 988 million yuan in taxes, and its brand value reached 13.513 billion yuan.
This established pharmaceutical company has deployed its self-developed large model and hundreds of AI intelligents to various stages such as the R&D platform, production workshops, and e-commerce live streaming rooms, exploring a AI experiment across the entire pharmaceutical manufacturing chain.
Transformation of Established Pharmaceutical Companies' AI
The story begins in June 2024.
At that time, large model technology was just beginning to emerge in China. Many industry insiders exclaimed that large models provided a practical application for the vast amounts of data that had been accumulated. Zhang Guimin, the Party secretary, chairman, and general manager of Lunan Pharmaceutical Group, personally initiated a nationwide strategy (represented by AI) within the company, targeting the three major pain points in the pharmaceutical industry: long R&D cycles, high costs, and low success rates. He established a transformation direction that focused on the deep integration of AI with the pharmaceutical sector.
Transformation is not just about shouting slogans; it requires substantial financial investment. In March 2025, Lunan Pharmaceutical invested 3.34 million yuan in purchasing high-end intelligent computing equipment, achieving a total computing power of 11.6 PFLOPS. From now on, AI, plans are beginning to be put into practice with actual hardware.
In Zhang Guimin's view, transforming towards AI first requires organizational transformation.
On February 27th of this year, Lunan Pharmaceutical issued a special document to establish a leading group for the AI and process transformation project. The transformation of AI was designated as a "top leader" project, with Zhang Guimin serving as the team leader to coordinate and advance the efforts. The initiative aims to completely break down barriers between departments such as research and development, production, supply chain, marketing, and administration, and to promote digital and intelligent transformation across all areas.
Originally, according to traditional practices, the special leading group was structured with the vice president of the group serving as the deputy leader, and the heads of the IT R&D center and information center as members. Zhang Guimin took the initiative to adjust the structure by swapping the roles of deputy leader and member. 'This structural adjustment breaks with convention by allowing a team that truly understands technology and AI to take the lead in decision-making, granting the IT department the highest authority to coordinate the full-scenario implementation and business process reengineering of AI,' said Liu Fangliang, the director of the IT R&D center at Lunan Pharmaceutical.
As a result, Lunan Pharmaceutical has established a three-tier governance mechanism of "top-level decision-making, specialized promotion, and departmental collaboration" in this AI transformation.
At the general meeting, Zhang Guimin repeatedly emphasized, "_AI is not an exclusive task for the information technology department; it is a compulsory course for all management staff and frontline employees. AI The intelligent entity is a 'new colleague' that accompanies everyone in their daily work, and everyone must know how to use it, make good use of it, and utilize it effectively."
As a result, Lunan Pharmaceutical mobilized all its staff, from workshop operators to researchers and sales personnel, to propose requirements for the AI scenario. Each business department also appointed dedicated AI liaison officers to regularly coordinate with the IT R&D team.
AI When it comes to implementation in pharmaceutical companies, the first hurdle is not whether the model performance is good or not, but whether it can operate effectively within their own infrastructure. In September 2026, Lunan Pharmaceutical added another bid for computing power equipment worth 16.23 million yuan, bringing the total investment in computing power to 19.57 million yuan, and the overall computing power scale soared to 40.56 PFLOPS.
At the same time, with the GPU cluster as its core, this enterprise has integrated an enterprise-level private cloud data center that has passed national Class B certification, ensuring that core data is "zero-leakage and traceable."
AI Deep integration across the entire chain
When the reporter visited, on the screen in front of Wang Yuancai, the product manager at Lunnan Pharmaceutical’s IT R&D center, the AI large model and intelligent agent were tirelessly “working.”
In 2026, Lunan Pharmaceutical established the "Lunan Zhiqing Large Model Service Platform" and developed over 100 intelligent agents, with more than 200 practical applications implemented across various segments of the industrial chain, including R&D, human resources, finance, clinical operations, sales, production, and quality control.
Wang Yuancai introduced that the biggest feature of the "Lunan Zhiqing Large Model Service Platform" is that it runs entirely within the local computing power environment deployed by the enterprise itself, which ensures higher security and autonomy of the data. On one hand, its data foundation comes from over 30 years of industry experience accumulated by the group's information center; on the other hand, it draws from nearly 10 years of application development and exploration by the IT research and development center. Additionally, by integrating open-source large model technologies, the platform enables localized deployment and scenario-specific implementation of applications.
The development of innovative drugs is characterized by high risks, high investment, and long cycles, with an extremely high failure rate. To address this issue, the New Era Pharmaceutical Chemical Drug Research and Development Center under Lunan Pharmaceutical has established an "Artificial Intelligence Drug Research and Development Platform," starting from the need that has not been met in clinical practice.
The platform focuses on "tool empowerment + strategic innovation" as its core, enabling intelligent decision-making across the entire process from "anti-tumor target discovery to macrocyclic molecule design, candidate screening, synthesis process optimization, and pre-clinical validation."
After identifying the target molecule, the platform intelligently generates thousands of similar molecules based on the designed reference molecule, and then conducts intelligent screening from multiple dimensions such as drug efficacy, synthesizability, and kinetic calculations. For a project, only about 100 molecules need to be synthesized and subjected to subsequent activity tests to determine the pre-clinical candidate drug molecules. According to traditional R&D approaches, it is usually necessary to synthesize at least 200 molecules. Zhang Hao, the person in charge of small molecule drug development at New Era Pharmaceutical, stated that AI significantly reduces the time and cost associated with new drug development, with an expected reduction of over 30% in the new drug R&D cycle. The development cycle for lead compounds can be compressed from the industry standard of 36 months to less than 20 months.
In the workshops of modern traditional Chinese medicine industrialization projects, artificial intelligence technology is deeply integrated into intelligent production and quality control. Wang Fei, the team leader of Workshop 1 and Workshop 2 at the New Era Pharmaceutical Company, introduced that the workshops for the pretreatment and extraction of modern traditional Chinese medicine have established a modern production system that connects the pretreatment of medicinal materials, intelligent warehousing, automatic batching and feeding, intelligent extraction, and automatic transfer.
"In the past, during the extraction process, controlling the steam pressure relied entirely on the experience of senior craftsmen. It often took more than 10 years to train such a craftsman. Now, we have verified this experience through scientific research, condensed and transformed it into data, and then implemented it through large models and intelligent agents to achieve full-process automation. As a result, the quality of our products has become uniform and stable," Wang Fei explained. Within the workshop, 12 temporary storage areas for processed medicinal materials are managed uniformly by the system, with AGV ensuring automatic material flow; key parameters such as water addition, heating, temperature, and time during the extraction process are automatically controlled, effectively improving the stability of the manufacturing process and the consistency of product quality."
On the marketing side, the group's e-commerce center launched the AI customer service robot, which independently handles 80% of basic pre-sales medication consultations for stores 24/7; the pharmaceutical AI translation system now provides simultaneous translation in four languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, and Russian, increasing the efficiency of compliant text translation by 50%. In the first half of 2026, Lunnan Pharmaceutical's e-commerce business saw a year-on-year growth rate of 38%.
However, in this full-chain AI experiment, Lunan Pharmaceutical also encountered three prominent difficulties.
A person in charge of the group frankly stated that, first, the cost pressure of expanding computing power is significant. The prices of GPU devices remain high, and there is a tight supply-demand situation. Enterprises facing the challenge of expanding their own capacity have to deal with long return cycles and rapid technological iterations. Second, it is difficult to obtain high-quality professional data. Internal enterprise data is scattered across multiple systems, and the standards are not unified, making high-quality public datasets in the pharmaceutical field scarce. Third, there is a severe shortage of composite talents—those who understand both pharmaceuticals and AI. The talent market for such cross-disciplinary professionals is extremely limited. Linyi, where the enterprise is located, being a third-tier city, has a clear gap in talent attraction compared to first-tier cities.
Transforming towards AI is a continuous process of improvement for modern enterprises. According to the plan, Lunan Pharmaceutical will deeply implement and scale the application of AI across all links of research, production, supply, sales, and service. This will break down business data silos, expand the foundation of high-quality data, and promote efficient collaboration among multiple intelligent entities, enabling artificial intelligence to transform from a cost center that supports business operations into a core value engine that drives the high-quality development of the group.
Zhang Guimin stated that in the future, Lunan Pharmaceutical will continue to deeply cultivate the innovative applications of AI, promoting the penetration of intelligent technologies across all business areas, throughout the entire value chain, and into every position. With digital and intelligent innovation as the core engine, the company aims to accelerate its progress towards the development goal of becoming a "100-billion-yuan Lunan".
(Author: Zhong Ang)
