For Jack Perry, Chairman of the UK's 48 Group Club, China has never been a distant concept or just an unfamiliar market. Rather, the name has long been woven into his family lineage, carrying both a professional legacy and an emotional bond across generations.

The Perry family's connection with China dates back more than seventy years. In 1952, his grandfather, also named Jack Perry, spearheaded the first trade delegation between Britain and China, marking the beginning of the historic "ice-breaking" journey. Over the following decades, his father, Stephen Perry, carried on this mission, diving deep into technology and manufacturing while steadily strengthening the ties between the two nations.

Today, Jack Perry often jokes that he is "ice-breaker 3.0" — a title that simultaneously honors the pioneering courage of his forebears and reflects his clear understanding of his own responsibilities. His current task is not merely to continue the exchanges, but to reassess China's position in the future technological landscape and leverage this new wave of innovation to build even more imaginative bridges between China and the UK.

Although he has visited China many times before, this latest trip marked Perry's first entry into Xiong'an — a new city located just 105 kilometers from Beijing, widely regarded as a blueprint for China's future urban development. From intelligent infrastructure to sustainable development concepts, everything in Xiong'an seeks to answer a fundamental question: how can technology better serve people in cities?

Perry's exploration actually began before reaching his first destination. Through Baidu's Apollo Go autonomous ride-hailing service, he personally experienced driverless vehicles navigating through city streets. As the scenery rolled steadily past the windows, he realized that AI-powered transportation has moved beyond laboratory demonstrations and is now becoming a real part of everyday life.

At Mech-Mind Robotics, a company specializing in embodied intelligence, he observed robots capable of perceiving their surroundings, analyzing tasks, and making autonomous decisions. However, what truly captured his attention was not the machinery itself, but the "brain" driving it all — large language models, computer vision, advanced scanning technologies, and other invisible architectures that are redefining the very boundaries of "intelligence."

Beyond the laboratory, he discovered that automation has already permeated even the most mundane corners of daily life: robot-staffed coffee shops, and Geek+'s smart warehousing systems where automated sorting, transport, and dispatch are rewriting entire logistics chains through algorithms.

At Wenzhun Intelligence, a company incubated by Tsinghua University, Perry further witnessed how artificial intelligence is penetrating the very fabric of industry. The structured big data model LimiX developed there possesses generalization capabilities and causal interpretability, making it widely applicable across manufacturing and business operations as an invisible engine for enhancing efficiency and competitiveness.

"Throughout this journey, one word kept recurring in my mind — excellence," Perry said. "China is already ahead in many areas. The next step is to leverage cooperation, technical exchanges, and concrete projects to ensure China's innovative achievements can better benefit the world."

From autonomous driving and embodied intelligence to smart logistics and industrial large models, this visit to Xiong'an gave Perry a close-up view of the speed and vitality of China's AI development, while also reinforcing his conviction that China and the UK share vast opportunities for collaboration in this new wave of technological transformation. As "ice-breaker 3.0," he hopes to continue his family's multi-generational mission of "breaking the ice" and find new entry points for Sino-British technological cooperation.