Integrating AI General Education with Digital Literacy Cultivation and Cognitive Construction in Industry-Specific Universities

Artificial intelligence has evolved into a general-purpose technology that permeates nearly every corner of knowledge production and social governance. This transformation is pushing college students' digital literacy far beyond the traditional "digitization" benchmark toward what this paper terms "intelligent-digital" literacy. For industry-specific universities—institutions committed to serving specific industries and cultivating application-oriented talents—the significance of AI general education is perhaps even greater than for other types of universities, because their graduates directly enter the industrial chain. Taking the practice of Moutai Institute as a concrete case, this paper elaborates on the internal logic, practical challenges, and feasible pathways for integrating AI general education into students' digital literacy cultivation and cognitive construction. The core argument of this paper is that such education should be anchored in industrial scenarios rather than abstract theory, and that cultivating compound talents equipped with digital literacy, industrial awareness, and social responsibility requires simultaneously grasping three main threads: technological empowerment, value guidance, and cognitive construction. On this basis, this paper proposes a trinity integration framework and offers actionable strategies from four dimensions: curriculum system, teaching model, faculty development, and evaluation mechanism. This paper aims to provide theoretical reference and practical insights for general education reform in industry-specific universities.