Ebrun Think Tank: Cross-border E-commerce, Content Creation, and Dataset Production Are Emerging as Main Tracks for OPC Entrepreneurship

[Original by Ebrun] Looking at economic news from the past six months, OPC (One-Person Company) has undoubtedly been a hot topic. As of June 2025, the number of one-person limited liability companies in China has exceeded 16 million, with 2.86 million new registrations in the first half of 2025 alone, a sharp increase of 47% year-on-year, accounting for 23.8% of all newly established enterprises. Behind these figures lie countless stories of entrepreneurs leveraging AI tools to break through the boundaries of traditional industries. As over 20 cities across the country have introduced special support policies for OPCs, and online/offline OPC communities have proliferated, a core question emerges: In which sectors are OPCs gaining the most momentum?

01 Cross-border E-commerce: The Most Mature OPC Track

An OPC is not necessarily a company with only one person. Its core concept refers to a single individual, with the collaborative support of communities, platforms, and AI digital employees, independently completing the entire business process or multiple key nodes—from product design and marketing to sales conversion—achieving operational capabilities that traditionally required a team of dozens. Cross-border e-commerce has been a primary focus for OPCs from the start. From January to September 2025, China's personal cross-border e-commerce merchandise exports accumulated to USD 84.35 billion, a year-on-year increase of 36.7%. Customs data shows that for the full year 2025, personal cross-border e-commerce exports reached USD 132.9 billion, a year-on-year growth of 37.8%, surpassing the trade volume of a medium-sized economy.

Initially, OPC entrepreneurs in this sector exhibited a clear trend of "talent flow from large tech companies." Xiao Wang, a former product manager at JD.com, co-founded an OPC company in Beijing's sub-center in the second half of 2025 with two partners. The three of them manage 14 stores covering Southeast Asia, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. Tasks that previously required dozens of people—such as product selection, listing, and customer service—now run entirely on AI engines: a single AI system manages all stores, automatically handling customer service inquiries at night, effectively replacing over a dozen human agents. The AI product selection system automatically captures overseas sales trends, consumer preferences, and even religious or cultural taboos, eliminating reliance on trial-and-error based on experience alone.

Today, the development of cross-border OPCs has gone far beyond this. With the rise of the "Lobster" (a term for AI-powered automation tools) trend, cross-border e-commerce platforms have launched their own versions of "Openclaw" for cross-border operations. Alibaba's international B2B platform, Alibaba.com, officially launched its enterprise-level AI Agent "Accio Work" on March 24, garnering significant attention. Other major platforms have also proactively opened up their AI tool ecosystems—from offering barrier-free access to open-source OpenClaw frameworks, to Shopify officially opening its AI Toolkit, allowing sellers to take over core operations with one click. These platform-based, low-cost, out-of-the-box features are making the startup barrier for "one-person companies" unprecedentedly low. A media survey has shown that with the help of AI digital human livestreaming tools for intelligent customer acquisition, cross-border OPC entrepreneurs can achieve performance multipliers such as a 70% reduction in labor costs and a 300% increase in sales.

02 Content Creation and Cultural Innovation: AIGC Redefines Creative Boundaries

If cross-border e-commerce is the "mature battlefield" for OPCs, then AIGC (AI-Generated Content) content creation is the new variable igniting change. From creating isolated graphic designs to producing integrated audio-visual content, AIGC is dramatically lowering the barriers to creation. OPC entrepreneur Xiao Liu, who previously accumulated rich experience at companies like Yuyuan Cultural Innovation and LKKER, established her own cultural innovation studio independently in 2024. With the help of AI, she compressed the production of animated videos, which typically requires multi-person collaboration, into a task manageable by a single person. Using 28 automatically generated storylines, she transformed flat visuals into animated narratives through AI, ultimately upgrading an ordinary cultural product into a new form with audio-visual storytelling capabilities. ByteDance announced the full launch of its video generation model "Doubao Seedance 2.0," enabling content creators to easily control the entire video creation process like a director. The breakout success of "The Golden Valley Saga" served as a clarion call, heralding the official arrival of the AI short drama era.

Notably, in April 2026, Hao Jingfang, winner of the 74th Hugo Award, announced the establishment of two OPC companies in Longgang, Shenzhen, focusing on three key areas: AIGC content creation, AI educational robots, and children's sci-fi IP. She summarized her entrepreneurial choice as a clear industry judgment: "Traditional animation seasons often require tens of millions of RMB in investment and a production cycle of up to two years. AIGC has completely broken down these barriers, enabling production with costs ranging from hundreds of thousands to a few million RMB and cycles of 10 to 15 days. The global robotics supply chain is right here in Shenzhen. I want to combine software and hardware to bring sci-fi stories into children's view at lower costs and faster speeds."

03 Dataset Products and Trading: The New Logic of the 'Fuel' Business

In the AI era, datasets are both the "fuel" for model training and the "passport" for commercial implementation. High-quality data trading is evolving from an industry pain point of "collected but unusable data" into a genuine business.

In April 2026, JD.com and Baidu successively launched their own embodied intelligence data trading platforms within a week, marking the official entry of data B2B e-commerce into a phase of intensive infrastructure development. Prior to this, Alibaba Cloud's Data Exchange had already served as an official data trading channel integrated into the cloud marketplace, supporting online search and purchase of datasets, providing standardized data products for AI training and application development. The core goal of data trading platforms is to establish a system for the circulation of industry data that is transferable, identifiable, and trustworthy, thereby addressing long-standing industry pain points: scarcity of high-quality data, high usage costs, and inconsistent format standards.

In fact, since 2026, multiple local governments have begun systematically supporting OPC entrepreneurship in the data field. Hubei Province introduced a special policy, establishing an "OPC" section on its public data open platform. It provides customized, high-quality public data resources, encourages OPCs to participate in the redevelopment of public data products, and aims to cultivate a batch of specialized data service providers. The Central China Data Circulation Service Center offers inclusive trading services to OPCs, providing transaction fee reductions for algorithm models, datasets, and other products they publish. Hubei Province innovatively promoted credit loans such as "Data E-Loan" based on data assets, and promoted models like "Investment-Loan Linkage" and "Investment-Insurance Linkage," directly injecting financial impetus into data-focused OPCs. Suzhou's layout in OPC entrepreneurship for the data sector is particularly striking. In January 2026, Tianju Dihe officially launched the nation's first "Online OPC Community for Datasets," covering over 160 high-quality AI datasets across fields like industrial manufacturing and medical education, and opening up more than 1,200 standard APIs and dataset services. Zuo Lei, Chairman of Tianju Dihe, emphasized: "The core is empowerment and synergy—entrepreneurs can significantly compress time costs, conduct efficient model training directly based on high-quality datasets, and achieve agile innovation." Meanwhile, the Dianshu Data Circulation Platform aggregates over 16,000 high-quality datasets, covering hot fields like AIGC, large model training, foreign trade, finance, and healthcare, bridging the path for data from cleaning and verification directly into the AI production pipeline. Furthermore, Paiyiti, as a one-stop AI dataset management platform, has currently opened access to nearly 100,000 datasets. Shuzhike, based on technologies like large language models, blockchain, and privacy computing, integrates a dual-mode data element circulation and trading system combining "on-exchange and off-exchange" models, helping data resource owners achieve a closed loop of data asset monetization encompassing "data governance, aggregation, integration, and utilization."

Across the data entrepreneurship track, a division of labor is taking shape, including: "data craftsmen" focused on dataset development, "data supermarket owners" providing standardized data API platforms, and intermediary service suppliers developing training data products for vertical industries. The vigorous development of these specialized platforms signifies that dataset production has become a universally accessible and profitable entrepreneurial track for OPCs.

04 Why the Model Works: The Tripartite Resonance of Technology, Demand, and Policy

The emergence of the above trends can be attributed to a tripartite resonance. From a technological empowerment perspective, the democratizing effect of large AI models is most directly evident in cross-border e-commerce, AIGC content creation, and data services. The end-to-end operations of cross-border e-commerce, the creative processing in content production, and the cleaning/delivery of data products—tasks that originally required multi-disciplinary collaboration—have been deconstructed by AI tools, making them feasible for individuals or minimal teams.

From a market demand perspective, cross-border e-commerce aligns with the massive wave of Chinese manufacturing going global; personalized, fragmented content demands have spawned numerous AIGC cultural innovation opportunities; and the continuous thirst for high-quality data for AI model training has provided a path for the commercialization of data products and services.

From a policy support perspective, from Suzhou's online OPC community for datasets to Hubei's special policies for data circulation, from office space policies at Shanghai's Lingang Zero-Boundary Cube to various local digital intelligence investment ecosystems—local policies are evolving from the early stage of "providing funds and land" towards a deeper direction of "providing capabilities, resources, and ecosystems."

Compared to e-commerce, content creation, and data services, hardware-oriented tracks like embodied intelligent robots currently lack similarly fertile ground for OPC entrepreneurship. High hardware investment, multi-disciplinary collaboration, the need for industrial-grade equipment for small/medium trial production lines, and the capital-intensive nature of physical environment system integration and multi-link operations and maintenance determine that such tracks are unlikely to adopt the lightweight "one-person army" model in the short term. This precisely illustrates that the success of OPC entrepreneurship is not simply about "replacing people with AI," but about finding incremental opportunities where the cost structure is most suitable for digitization, driven by the triple factors of technology, demand, and policy.

05 Conclusion: The Continuous Evolution of the OPC Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

These OPCs are no longer the exclusive domain of elites in first-tier cities. In Suzhou, the nation's first online OPC community for datasets and the all-element platform integrating data, computing power, scenarios, and capital within SISPARK have created a "six-in-one" OPC empowerment field. In Hangzhou, one of China's earliest established OPC communities, "Honghu Hui," has sketched a new profile of OPC entrepreneurs based on extensive real data. In Longgang, Shenzhen, the AIGC cultural innovation OPC ecosystem community is forming a dual closed loop of "order empowerment + technical services," with order fulfillment as its breakthrough point.

As the three defining characteristics on the national OPC entrepreneurship map—the mature global supply chain of e-commerce, the productivity restructuring of AIGC content creation, and the infrastructure development for data products and trading—become increasingly recognized, the narrative surrounding the "one-person company" is likely to reach an even more dynamic turning point: it is a trending buzzword in entrepreneurship, and more likely, it could become a sub-mainstream economic form in the post-internet era.

Ebrun Think Tank will continue to monitor the enhancement of industrial and corporate competitiveness related to data elements and report on new developments and case studies.

Contact email: huangbin@ebrun.com