Your technology roadmap may still be built on secondary sources. Your competitor may already have stood next to hardware that never appeared in a consultant deck.
This is 8 days of ground truth: what is real, shipping, or still fiction — so your technologist can say: “I stood next to something real we could access.”
Buyer: Company sponsor (CTO / strategy / CSO context).
Traveller: Often a tech or strategy delegate.
Designed to deliver: board-ready real-vs-vaporware clarity.
Steven: signature moments · lead guide runs the week
Deliverables (Booking Form): board-ready brief + visit log — venues remain indicative.
Sales honesty: we never headliner-sell unbooked national labs, no-safety-driver AV, or flying-car lines. Theme language only until access is real.
The week
| Day | City | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shenzhen | Arrival + AI immersion — showroom, autonomous driving |
| 2 | Shenzhen | Robots in the wild — quadrupeds, industrial arms, cobot programming |
| 3 | Dongguan | Humanoid + industrial — humanoid lab, dark factory |
| 4 | Guangzhou | Autonomous everything — XPeng smart factory, flying car, GAC Aion |
| 5 | Guangzhou | AI labs + chips — chip lab, national lab |
| 6 | Zhuhai | Flying cars + energy — drone swarm, solid-state battery R&D |
| 7 | Hong Kong | The edge — legal/capital layer, founder dinner |
| 8 | Hong Kong | Synthesis + departure |
What they’ll do
Access classes — illustrative density, not guarantees:
AI showroom. Visit a 3,000 m² intelligent showroom when access opens. Large models. Real-time digital makeup. AI Go robot at pro level. 3D content engine generating scenes in 10 minutes that would take a VFX team a week. The AI everyone reads about, live and interactive.
Autonomous driving test ride. Ride in a Level 4 autonomous vehicle on real Shenzhen streets when access opens. Watch the lidar point cloud. See the car navigate aggressive lane changes, scooters, pedestrians. Reading about autonomous driving ≠ sitting in a car with no driver in Shenzhen traffic.
Robot dog lab. Visit a quadruped robotics company. See robot dogs navigate stairs, uneven terrain, obstacles. Engineer explains actuator design, SLAM, RL for gait. Hands-on: pilot a robot dog. Try to knock it over — you can’t. Group: synchronized routine. A robot dog that does backflips, that you control, that self-rights when kicked.
Industrial robot line. Factory floor with industrial robot arms. Welding, painting, assembly, palletizing. Watch a KUKA arm weld a car chassis: 200 points, 45 seconds, 0.1 mm precision. “This robot replaced 12 workers. Output doubled. Defect rate cut by 90%.” Big yellow arms moving at frightening speed make automation real in a way no report can.
Collaborative robot programming. At a cobot showroom. Each person programs a collaborative robot arm — no code. Hand-guide through motions, record waypoints, set gripper actions. Task: pick and place, then assemble a simple product. In 30 minutes, someone who’s never touched a robot arm has it doing useful work. Kinesthetic teaching is deeply satisfying.
Humanoid robot lab. Visit a humanoid robotics company when access opens. See a bipedal robot walk, carry objects, navigate uneven terrain. Engineer explains DOF, servo joints, hands as the hardest part. A humanoid robot walking toward you is viscerally different from YouTube. Uncanny, exciting, slightly unsettling. Theme language until booked.
Dark factory — lights-out manufacturing. A fully automated factory — zero human workers on the floor. CNC machines, robot arms, AGVs, automated inspection. Lights off because no one needs to see. “24/7. Zero defects from human error. Headcount: five engineers monitoring screens, down from 200 workers.” Endgame of manufacturing.
XPeng smart factory + flying car. Morning: EV smart factory when bookable — stamping, welding, painting, assembly with 400+ robots, a car every 60 seconds. Afternoon: AeroHT flying car division if access opens — modular ground vehicle + flight module. One company, two futures. Sell at theme level until confirmed; never headliner-promise flying-car lines.
GAC Aion — battery safety test. NEV factory when booked. The nail penetration test: watch a battery get stabbed with a nail and NOT catch fire. Silicon-anode batteries: 1,000 km+ range. High robot density in body shop. ~400,000 vehicles per year capacity. The most convincing EV demo possible.
AI chip lab. Visit an AI chip company when relationship opens. Chip design process, architecture overview, deployment in ADAS and cloud AI. Sanctions story from engineers living it. AI chips are the most geopolitically charged technology on Earth. This conversation doesn’t happen through media — only through access. Theme language until booked.
Peng Cheng Laboratory. National-level lab for network-AI convergence when government intro succeeds. Semantic communication, 6G research, multi-lingual LLM on distributed compute. National lab access that normally requires a government delegation. Never headliner-sell; internal wishlist until warm.
Drone swarm / aerial robotics. Visit a drone company. Demo: synchronized light show. Hands-on: program a small drone fleet. Industrial applications: agricultural spraying, power line inspection, delivery. “The sky is logistics infrastructure now.” Spectacular footage — profound implications.
Solid-state battery R&D deep dive. Extended visit to a battery innovation center or solid-state startup when access opens. Materials R&D: sulfide vs. oxide electrolytes. Manufacturing challenges. Testing lab: cycle life, safety, fast charge. Failed experiments, prototype cells, PhDs arguing electrolyte formulations. Window into how hard tech actually gets built: slow, expensive, and incremental.
Hong Kong legal + capital layer for deep tech. Roundtable with IP lawyer and VC partner. Where to incorporate, how to protect IP across borders, how to structure China-US investment. HK as neutral ground. Case study: robotics company incorporated in HK, raised in USD, manufactured in Dongguan, sold globally. Deep tech is hard enough without legal and capital structure mistakes.
Founder dinner — someone who built it. Private dinner with a GBA deep tech founder from Steven’s network — robotics, AI chip, battery, or ADAS. Someone who raised $50M+, shipped product, navigated US-China tensions. “What I wish I knew on day one. The three times we almost died.” No PR. No pitch deck. A founder with real scars and nothing to sell.
What your technologist walks away with
Contracted on the Booking Form:
- A board-ready brief separating real from vaporware for your sector
- What’s shipping now — hardware you can touch when access opens
- What’s on a credible timeline — with manufacturing context
- What’s still engineering fiction — showroom demos that may not leave the lab
- A visit log for internal briefing
Who runs it
A bilingual lead guide delivers the week. Steven — 26 years owning factories in China; Chief Global Advisor roles at CERS and CNECC — aims for signature moments at key spikes. Doors open because relationships are real.
How to think about the fee
Compared with a roadmap or board story built only on secondary sources — this week buys firsthand evidence. Not a warranty that a named lab opens.
Pricing
| Early Bird | Standard |
|---|---|
| US $16,888 | US $21,888 |