The high-quality development of agriculture is an imperative pathway in the new era for building a strong agricultural nation and advancing agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics. Deeply implementing the ″Artificial Intelligence +″ initiative in the agricultural sector and accelerating the digital-intelligent transformation and upgrading of agriculture constitute an important approach to empowering the high-quality development of agriculture. From a theoretical perspective, artificial intelligence promotes productivity improvement by optimizing factor endowments, alleviates information asymmetry to enhance supply-demand matching, drives efficient resource utilization to strengthen the synergy between ecological and economic development, facilitates the internationalization of value chains to optimize global resource allocation, and balances interest distribution to consolidate the foundation for common prosperity. However, the current application of artificial intelligence to empower high-quality agricultural development is confronted with practical dilemmas, including bottlenecks in key core technologies, weak rural infrastructure, fragmented agricultural data resources, and a shortage of interdisciplinary and professional talents. Moving forward, it is essential to intensify research on key technological breakthroughs and accelerate the transformation and extension of technological achievements; improve agricultural infrastructure and build an artificial intelligence service system; construct a high-quality agricultural data system and establish a secure data sharing mechanism; strengthen talent team development and carry out tiered and categorized training programs. By doing so, we can fully unleash the potential of the integrated empowerment of ″Artificial Intelligence +″ to effectively drive the high-quality development of agriculture.