Artificial Intelligence Empowering New Quality Productive Forces of Enterprises: A Perspective on Supply Chain Resilience

Developing new quality productive forces represents a core strategy for steering China’s path to modernization and shaping new competitive advantages for the nation. As a leading technology in the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) serves as a key engine for fostering new quality productive forces. Utilizing panel data from China’s A-share listed manufacturing firms (2012–2024), this study employs the penetration rate of industrial robots to proxy for AI development levels and the entropy method to measure new quality productive forces. From the perspective of supply chain resilience, ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variable (IV) methods are employed to examine the impact of AI on enterprise new quality productive forces and its underlying mechanisms. The findings indicate that AI significantly enhances corporate new quality productive forces, a conclusion that remains robust after addressing potential endogeneity and conducting robustness checks. Mediation analysis reveals that AI reinforces corporate supply chain resilience by improving supply chain efficiency and strengthening supply chain discourse power, which in turn drives the enhancement of corporate new quality productive forces. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the impact of AI on corporate new quality productive forces is heterogeneous, with particularly pronounced effects observed in firms with higher innovation levels, state-owned enterprises, and firms located in western China. This study contributes new evidence from a supply chain resilience perspective to understand the micro-level pathways through which AI empowers new quality productive forces, and offers targeted policy and managerial recommendations to foster the sustainable development of the manufacturing sector.