Research on the Impact of New-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Innovation Quality of Manufacturing Enterprises: An Empirical Analysis Based on Double Machine Learning

Driven by the strategies of high-quality development and manufacturing transformation and upgrading, China’s economy is gradually shifting to an innovation-driven growth model. Empowering firms to lift innovation quality through new-generation artificial intelligence has become a core priority for industrial development and policy support. This paper adopts unbalanced panel data of A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2012 to 2023 and employs the Double Machine Learning model to systematically investigate the impact and transmission mechanisms of new-generation artificial intelligence on manufacturing firms’ innovation quality. The results reveal that new-generation artificial intelligence can significantly boost manufacturing firms’ innovation quality, and this core conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism verification confirms that new-generation artificial intelligence promotes the upgrading of firms’ human capital structure, deepens firms’ digital transformation, and raises firms’ R&D investment intensity. These three channels work synergistically to indirectly empower the upgrading of firms’ innovation quality. Heterogeneity analysis verifies that the innovation quality improvement effect of new-generation artificial intelligence exhibits prominent stratified differences across regions, industrial sectors, and environmental regulatory scenarios. Specifically, the empowerment effect of new-generation artificial intelligence (GAI) is significantly stronger for samples from environmental pilot cities, Southern Coastal, Eastern Coastal, and Northern Coastal regions, as well as high-tech manufacturing firms. In contrast, its positive driving effect is weak or insignificant for samples in the middle reaches of the Yellow River and Northwest China, along with non-high-tech industries. This paper improves the theoretical analytical framework for artificial intelligence empowering micro-firm innovation and enriches relevant research on digital technologies and corporate innovation. It provides a theoretical basis and practical implications for China’s manufacturing sector to break through innovation bottlenecks via intelligent technologies and achieve comprehensive high-quality innovative development across the manufacturing industry.