Leaner, keener — OPCs altering way we work

Shanghai is positioning itself as the center of the coming one-person company (OPC) wave, which, with the help of artificial intelligence, is radically changing the way many people work, experts said.

Lujiazui Financial City in Pudong New Area is home to over 8,000 licensed financial companies. On April 28, it founded the Cyber Harbor OPC Community. In less than one week, over 30 OPCs started operating in the newly opened space.

Nan Chuan, founder of the OPC lovstudio.ai, is one of the original tenants of the community. Starting his own business in 2023, Nan has developed over 10 AI-powered developer tools, which can significantly improve efficiency in content creation and company operations.

"Favorable policies such as capital, compute power or housing subsidies are not the primary reasons bringing me here. This place has the right 'vibe'. I can discuss artificial general intelligence with all the other OPC founders here all the time. More importantly, the community operator is a true believer in the transformative power of AI as well as the heavy use of AI tools," he said.

'Cheaper, better'

OPCs are rapidly emerging as a defining feature of China's digital economy, prompting local governments to rethink how they can support and scale entrepreneurship.

The leapfrogging progress in AI, which makes technology cheaper and more accessible, has catalyzed the mushrooming of these entities. By mid-2025, China had more than 16 million one-person limited liability companies, according to a report by the Zhongguancun Talent Association.

AI tools — from code generators to content engines — are dramatically lowering the cost of starting and running a company. In 2010, for instance, building a software-as-a-service product required a small engineering team and an infrastructure budget of over $50,000.

But in 2026, a single founder using coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor, can come up with a product in under 30 days, costing less than $200 per month in tooling.

Every 1 yuan ($0.15) of AI investment at an OPC equates to 72 yuan of expenditure on human capital, according to Honghub, a Hangzhou-based OPC community founded in September in Zhejiang province.

"In places with higher human capital costs, the efficiency of AI tools in replacing equivalent human labor costs is more noticeable. As AI programming capabilities continue to improve, the corresponding efficiency gains will be further amplified," said Honghub's co-founder Zhou Zhuoran.

Zeng Gang, director of the Institute of Urban Development at East China Normal University, explained that OPCs outsource their non-prime functions to AIs. They have a strong demand for networked social collaboration and intelligent agent tools such as OpenClaw.

"Ever since the surge of hard technology companies such as DeepSeek and Unitree Robotics, governments have come to realize that disruptive forces that burst from individuals or small groups may serve as the key engines of industrial revolution," he said.

Given their smaller size, OPCs have advantages in quick decision-making, high innovation flexibility, and low costs of trial and error. They naturally fit into the role of new forces seeking active breakthroughs in hard technologies, said Zeng.

The majority of the current OPC founders, about 75 percent, have no background in technology. Product managers, content creators, designers and industry experts constitute the diverse backgrounds, according to Honghub.