On February 10, the State Key Laboratory of Conservation and Utilization of Subtropical Agricultural Biological Resources, in collaboration with the School of Agriculture and the School of Computer, Electronics and Information, hosted a symposium titled "AI-Driven, Sweet Future" to explore innovative pathways for deep integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with agricultural technology, adding new momentum into high-quality agricultural development in Guangxi. Vice Presidents Feng Jiaxun and Liang Enwei attended the event.

Feng highlighted GXU 's proactive steps in AI education, including the establishment of three new interdisciplinary programs—Artificial Intelligence, Data Computing and Applications, and Smart Agriculture—along with the introduction of an "Introduction to AI" course to enhance students' AI literacy. He emphasized GXU 's commitment to integrating AI into teaching and research, particularly in accelerating crop breeding and developing new plant varieties. AI is reshaping scientific paradigms, he stated, announcing plans to form cross-disciplinary teams to tackle key challenges in sugarcane breeding and drive local economic growth.

Liang described AI as both a cutting-edge technology and an important tool, encouraging researchers to leverage it for breakthroughs. In agriculture, we must concentrate resources on sugarcane research to pioneer AI-agriculture convergence, he asserted. He called on younger generations to embrace responsibility and interdisciplinary approaches, using AI as a bridge to lead disciplinary integration and become pioneers and leaders in discipline establishment.

Experts discussed deeply on challenges and future of AI’s agricultural application, focused on various fronting fields and made academic presentations. Themes included Synergies between AI and sugarcane genomic breeding, Application of Deepseek technology in sugarcane breeding, Prospects of plant pan-genome methodologies, Integration of remote sensing with AI systems, Breakthroughs of AlphaFold in biological research, Edge computing in the era of large AI models, AI applications in sugarcane phenomics and large language model training. These discussions provided actionable insights for implementing AI in agricultural innovation.

Over 100 faculty representatives and student representatives attended the symposium.