The Power of One: The Single-Person Army

[AI-Generated Illustration]

Analysis

The Solopreneur might be a novel word to most, but this is hackneyed compared with the One Person Company model. Unlike a sole proprietor, sole trader, freelancer or independent contractor, the One Person Company, or OPC, is more than a company or legal structure; it is a conceptual model promising economic and market access advantages as economies shift into the age of AI.

The OPC model uses individual knowhow – “core capability concentration” – combined with access to AI-based business support functions, such as marketing, accounting, and procurement, where AI becomes the office and functional support. Taken on especially enthusiastically in the GBA, the current buzz is that the One Person Company is the hottest new entrepreneurial business trend nationwide.

Although fundamentally different in nature to what is unfolding in China – where OPCs are intrinsic to the new industrial policy – there has been an increase in single-founder companies internationally: in the UK in 2025, of the 5.7 million private businesses, 4.3 million were single-person businesses with no other employees (75%).

Baidu reported that non-employer business in Australia grew by 4.9% from 2023 to 2024. In the United States, surveys indicate that single-founder new ventures were 23.9% of the total in 2019 and increased to 36.3% of the total in 2025, an increase of 53% over six years.

It is early days for China, but most OPC entrepreneurs appear to be in the mid-20s to mid-30s and are concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta, in the GBA, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and industrial cities in the west and central China, according to the China OPC Development Research Report 2026. The China Daily reported there were more than 16 million registered One Person Limited Liability Companies comprising 27.4% of total companies by mid-2025.

Building the OPC ecosystem

The big push started late 2025 at the first AI OPC Conference in Suzhou where the OPC model was presented. Suzhou proposed an OPC city with 30 OPC communities and 1,000 OPCs by 2028.

In December, an AI OPC Innovation and Development Conference was held in Yangzhou with similar proposals presented and eight government service reforms put on the table. By January 2026, the GBA got active discussing OPC trends at an AI Ecosystem conference in Shenzhen where upgrades to traditional business thinking towards OPC models were discussed. By the next mid-January conference in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, “super individuals” were being invited to the city’s first OPC community. Other regions had dialogues and discussions conceptualising and forming models integrating OPCs into smart manufacturing and space support, and empowering them with technology and releasing service plans.

OPC communities have been popping up all over the nation. By February, city governments were formulating OPC support policies and putting hundreds of millions of yuan behind the efforts. Guangdong has released an action plan to develop 10 AI OPC ecological communities in 2026 alone, and 100 by 2028.

Success is built upon elements supporting each other in a self-sustaining ecosystem. In the OPC space we are seeing a range of drivers each integrated into and influencing each other: economic trends, technological imperatives, workforce trajectories and market demand.

The AI entrepreneur

Solopreneurs and individual entrepreneurship are generally hamstrung by the conflict between focusing on their specialised knowhow and unique skills on the one hand and the time and resource demands to administer and run the business on the other.

The ability to focus individual efforts on core activities are central to creating competitive advantage and commercial success. Entrepreneurs have, however, customarily been pressured to stay small and work crazy hours, or take on staff and grow the business. The work of that small team of collaborators can now be provisioned through AI, taking on support roles such as customer service, accounting, data analysis and even to provide assistance with simple decision-making processes and mentorship-like feedback.

AI has empowered the individual entrepreneur to focus on the core of the business and not to have to fret over whether any future income stream will cover an expanding list of expenses. Being small is no longer a liability and any losses are minimised under the OPC framework.

The market too has changed. Indeed, being small and adaptable gives the OPC the ability to meet small market niche demand, and even to meet the needs of individual customers. In business operations, there is generally a trade-off between customisation – which has been costly to achieve – and standardisation which enables a lowering of per-unit costs.

These were the conventional generic strategies of differentiation versus cost leadership. With new AI technologies and support from government policies, infrastructure provision and facilitated access to key production networks and supply-chain ecosystems, these vast numbers of OPCs can cater more readily to niche market segments.

The modern service-based economy, according to Baidu, is less about goods and more about purchasing content, experiences, knowledge, convenience and professional services. A large contingent of “armies of one” can now, with agility, provide customised offerings at lower prices – the long dreamt of mass customisation.

Labour emancipation or survival strategy?

Another critical rational for government policy development to support the OPCs is an existential one. Here, I refer precisely to the AI Jobs Apocalypse dilemma raised in these pages last week of the foreseeable higher rates of unemployment as larger companies turn to automation, replacing workers to reduce costs. Integrated systems-thinking urges us to recognise that within the substance of the problem itself, a solution shall be found.

We might consider that OPC policy implementation is one step ahead of the greater damage expected to demand as increasing unemployment rates loom on the horizon. China has been working for a while now to strengthen consumer confidence and domestic demand, and to reinforce a fragile labour market.

The innovation – and ironically, given China’s big-government context – is that rather than regulate against the competitive impulses towards automation, AI is being used to incentivise a new and empowered workforce, one that lives and survives on its Personal IP in an AI-enabled ecosystem.

Could this be a new form of labour emancipation? Professor Zhang Zhenpeng from Shenzhen University Cultural Industry Research Institute hints this might well be the case: “OPCs can…break the constraints of traditional employment relationships on individual value.” By Leanda Lee