To clarify: this is not a new policy from this week. The document was issued on August 31, 2026, which falls within the past-year window and outside the past-7-day window; it was also not covered in the 18 articles we previously wrote. The reason we are bringing it up now is that the reporting deadline on December 1 is only twenty-two days away, and it concerns us implementation service providers ourselves—it is not just a policy for clients to read.
At our internal meeting last week, we discussed a very practical question: whether we should try to get into this service provider resource pool.
Halfway through the argument, we realized that the real question wasn't “should we report it” but “what do we use to prove we did it.”
2000, 3000, 100, and 10 — these four numbers have different denominators
The several sets of figures given in the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Notice on Carrying Out the Special Action for Cultivating Artificial Intelligence Application Service Providers (MIIT General Office Science and Technology Letter [2026] No. 414, issued on 2026-08-31) are often mixed up when paraphrased; let us break them down first:
By the end of 2026, the national service provider resource pool will exceed 2,000 providers; by the end of 2027, no fewer than 3,000 providers. These are national-level targets for different years.
For provinces that administer national artificial intelligence industry innovation and application pilot zones, the local resource pool must have no fewer than 100 enterprises by the end of 2027—this is the lower limit for pilot-zone provinces; the denominator has changed.
In principle, each region shall submit no fewer than 10 “AI application service teams.” Each service team is led by 1 service provider and jointly formed with no fewer than 2 upstream and downstream units—this is a “service team,” not a “service provider”; the unit is 个, not 家, and the denominator has changed again.
The four sets of numbers cannot be added together, nor can they be converted into "how many quota slots Guangdong has." The notice also requires each region to build FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) teams and divide services into four categories: consulting and planning, delivery and implementation, operations management, and security governance.
There are two time nodes: before December 1, 2026, each region shall report the service provider resource pool information to the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; before December 1, 2027, submit a summary report. This must be stated precisely: December 1 is the node for regions to report to the Ministry, not the deadline for enterprises to apply to open to society. The two are not the same thing.
There is also one more qualification that must be placed first: As of November 9, 2026, no original official website text has been found for the Guangdong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology's provincial-level service provider solicitation notice corresponding to Document No. 414. We did not find it during the review round on November 6, and it is still not available when we checked again today. Therefore, it cannot be written as 'Guangdong has opened applications,' nor can we infer the provincial-level submission requirements and timetable on the client's behalf. A forwarded copy from another province does not mean that this province has opened a channel.
Pool entry materials, in fact, are project delivery records
Look at the four categories of services in the notice against our daily business: consulting planning and delivery implementation are our main business; operations management is tangentially related; security governance is not a focus of our Odoo implementation. If we really need to report, only the first two categories are what we can actually present.
And the materials to be submitted for these two categories are none other than the service provider profile, service cases, and FDE team roster. It sounds like three documents, but in fact each one must have source documents on file for verification:
Service Provider Profile corresponds to the company's qualifications, team size, and deliverable service scope. For this item, most companies can make do with a business license and an introductory brochure.
Service cases are the dividing line. There is a pitfall here: many people submit solution PPTs, architecture diagrams, and product white papers as cases, but what reviewers want to see is “whose organization this solution has been running in and how far it has progressed.” A verifiable case requires at least four documents—requirements confirmation, UAT sign-off, go-live confirmation, and acceptance report—plus an implementation timeline and performance figures that can be matched to it. We have always kept these four in our project work, not for the application, but because acceptance and final payment depend on them—and the incidental benefit is that during application season we don’t have to go back and fill them in.
FDE team roster requires that people and projects correspond: who has been at which client site, what modules they have worked on, and how many work hours they have invested. If a roster is hastily made up, it will be exposed as soon as it is checked against the work-hour ledger.
Mapped onto the structure of Odoo 19 CE + OCA, these three sets of materials are all in existing tables. Projects and tasks (project.project / project.task) record delivery scope and milestones; timesheets (account.analytic.line) record who worked on which project and how much time they invested; acceptance reports, UAT sign-offs, and go-live confirmations are attached to the corresponding tasks or projects as attachments; outcome figures come from production, inventory, and sales reports, not copied from summary documents. Only one additional thing needs to be done: tag AI-related projects with a filterable label or a separate analytic account, so that "which projects belong to AI application services" can be exported with one click. No code required; it can be done at the configuration level.
If a multi-company structure is used, there is an additional check: whether the contracting entity in the case, the legal entity to which the delivery team belongs, and the invoicing party are the same company. If three companies in the group each handled a portion but the case was reported as one company, the materials will not match up—such discrepancies do not affect delivery in normal times, but become very conspicuous at the qualification review stage.
By the way, a counterexample. In our own 'service cases,' the most telling one is often not the largest project, but the one that left a complete baseline comparison: what were the order processing time, inventory turnover days, and month-end closing days before go-live, and what are they after go-live, and which report the data comes from. Without a baseline, even the most beautiful architecture diagram is only a proposal, not a delivery record. This is actually the same logic as the requirement in Guangming District's software funding guide for 'actual level before implementation / actual level after implementation'—only this time it's our turn to hand in our exam paper.
Our own judgment, and that it may not necessarily be right
To be honest, as of today we still haven't decided whether to try to get into the pool.
The reasons for not applying are valid: the provincial channel is unclear; entering the pool does not mean getting orders; the resource pool is essentially a directory used for matching supply and demand across regions, not a procurement contract; spending the team's energy on organizing files may not be as worthwhile as spending it on projects in hand.
The reason for applying also holds: once this set of materials is organized, it will be useful for most subsequent applications. Whether it is for applying after the provincial-level supporting notice is issued, for a client requesting proof of service provider qualifications, or for directly participating in the upstream and downstream pairing of the "service team," the same batch of delivery records is used.
The approach I lean toward is a compromise: first get all the materials ready, but do not publicly claim any filing status; wait until the original text appears on the Guangdong provincial official website before deciding what to do. The reason is simple — we got burned once on November 6, when we treated an “intake pre-notification” that appeared only on a third-party platform and had not been traced back to the original official website text as formal progress, and in the end could only record it as a lead pending verification. When it comes to policy, it is better to say it a step late than to say it wrong first.
There is another gap that needs to be made clear: the goal of Document No. 414 is to cultivate the supply side of service providers, and the directory is on the scale of 2,000 or 3,000 providers. For enterprise customers, being on the pool list may in the future serve as a reference for screening service providers, but it does not evaluate the delivery quality of any individual implementer, nor does it guarantee project outcomes. Don't treat "being in the resource pool" as a basis for selection; you still need to look at the documents and figures in the case studies that can be matched up.
What we did ourselves first during the twenty-two days
By November 13, filter AI-related projects from the ledger and verify entity consistency. Criteria: whether the project belongs to one of the two categories—consulting planning or delivery implementation—and whether it has complete delivery records since 2025. Action: add a filterable tag or a separate analysis account to the project ledger, and check item by item whether the contracting entity, invoicing entity, and the legal entity of the delivery team are consistent; mark any inconsistencies separately and do not mix them into the case list.
By November 20, complete the service case working papers according to the "four documents." The criterion is whether each candidate case can produce requirements confirmation, UAT sign-off, go-live confirmation, and acceptance report. Supplement whichever document is missing; for cases that cannot be supplemented, remove them directly from the list, and do not substitute a solution PPT. At the same time, archive the baseline figures before and after implementation (order processing time, inventory turnover, month-end closing days, etc.) together with the data extraction reports, noting the statistical period and definitions.
Before November 30, only conduct one official website verification and make no action commitment. Judgment condition: whether the Guangdong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology has published on its official website the original provincial-level solicitation notice corresponding to Document No. 414. The action is to check once the provincial department portal and the related columns of “Yuezhifu”; if the original text exists, then schedule according to the applicant entities, material checklist, and timeline in it; if there is no original text, maintain “lead pending verification.” The December 1 ministerial submission node is only recorded as background and is not written as an enterprise deadline.
Before the provincial notice comes out, just leave these materials aside for now.
—— This article is a backfill of existing content: The policy basis is the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, MIIT General Office Science and Technology Letter [2026] No. 414, “Notice on Launching the Special Action for Cultivating AI Application Service Providers” (issued on 2026-08-31). The document number and date of issuance were cross-verified in the 2026-11-06 round against reprints on government websites. The respective definitions of 2000/3000/100/10 are the national target by the end of 2026, the national target by the end of 2027, the lower limit by the end of 2027 for local resource pools in leading-area provinces, and the lower limit for submissions by regional service teams; since the denominators differ, they cannot be added together. As of 2026-11-09, no original text of the Guangdong provincial-level supporting solicitation notice had been retrieved from the official website, and this article does not describe any not-yet-effective matter as open for application.
