Huawei and Shaanxi Culture Industry Investment Group are scaling a tourism-focused AI model in Xi’an. The system, called BoGuan, supports digital cultural services across Shaanxi province.
The partners describe BoGuan as the first commercial multimodal LLM built for cultural tourism. It uses text, images, audio, and video to answer visitor questions. It also helps create historically grounded experiences.
This matters because general AI tools often miss cultural detail. Tourists now expect personal digital guides and instant content. Yet heritage sites need accuracy, context, and trusted sources.
To solve this, the partners built a major specialist dataset. It includes 31 million images and 4.4 million minutes of video. It also contains 960 million pieces of structured text.
Edric Chu, General Manager of Huawei’s Shaanxi Rep Office, explained the challenge clearly. “General large models lack specialized knowledge in museology, archaeology and history, making it difficult to meet the nuanced demands of niche scenarios,”
BoGuan now powers several services for visitors and tourism businesses. These include AI travel assistants and multilingual tour guidance. It also supports museum explanations, marketing content, and heritage preservation.
For consumers, the model supports Xiaoqi on the GO-SHAANXI app. It also powers the Zhiying Camera mini program. Tourists can blend their photos with AI-generated historical scenes.
For businesses, BoGuan enables an AI “Video Factory.” This tool automates short drama and advertising production. That could reduce production time and lower creative costs.
The commercial results look promising. Huawei says BoGuan-powered applications have reached over four million users. SCG also reports stronger returns from digital products.
Jin Yan, Chairman of SCG’s Digital and Intelligent Culture Technology Group, said the impact is visible. “With the same team size, thanks to these technologies[…] from last year to this June our revenue has increased by roughly 30–40%,”
Still, this model needs serious infrastructure. Thousands of AI requests require high-speed connectivity and large computing capacity. SCG runs BoGuan on an on-premise 48P computing platform.
Meanwhile, China Telecom Shaanxi and Huawei deployed 5G Advanced at Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall. The network supports downlink speeds of 3.5 Gbps. It also supports uplink speeds of 600 Mbps.
Wang Hao, Director of Mobile Communications Network Business at China Telecom Shaanxi, highlighted the scale. “The Grand Tang Mall is a textbook example of a high-traffic, high-concurrency, and high-interaction scenario, which poses an immense challenge for any network,”
The deployment includes 46 base stations in a compact area. AI-enabled controls can prioritize resources during photo generation. The network can support 23,000 concurrent users during holiday peaks.
However, talent remains a bottleneck. These projects need workers who understand both AI and tourism. Chu said Shaanxi faces a gap of 30,000 to 50,000 specialists.
BoGuan now offers a blueprint for telecom-led vertical AI. Operators can combine cloud, compute, connectivity, and sector knowledge. That shift could unlock new growth beyond raw network capacity.
