Coordinated Development of AI-Enabled Agriculture–Culture–Tourism Endowments and Smallholder Income: Evidence from 98,400 Household-Year Observations in Southwest China

Can artificial intelligence (AI) turn the agricultural, cultural and tourism endowments of less-developed regions into higher and more stable smallholder incomes? This study treats AI as an enabling condition that shapes how rural endowments are combined and monetised, not as a stand-alone treatment, and examines the coupling between the AI-enabled agriculture–culture–tourism (A–C–T) endowment system and smallholder income growth in Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou, China. Combining county administrative indicators for 328 county-level units (2022–2024) with a three-wave survey of 34,785 unique smallholder households (98,400 household-year observations; 30,842 households (94.0% of baseline) present in all three waves; income reference years 2022–2024), we construct entropy-weighted coupling coordination degrees and regress household income on a coordination measure rebuilt from officially published county statistics, not from the survey itself. The regional coupling coordination degree rose from 0.575 in 2022 to 0.746 in 2024; every county had exited the imbalance grades by 2024. A 0.1-point higher coordination index is associated with about 5.8 percent higher per-capita net income, an association robust to household fixed effects, province-by-year shocks and instrumental-variable estimation. Roughly one-third of the association is statistically accounted for by non-farm employment, tourism engagement and e-commerce participation, though these decompositions are associational rather than causal. The association is strongest where initial endowments are weakest but weaker for low-income than for better-off households—a capability divide. Income gains appear sustained across the three-year window; long-run durability remains untested.