As living fossils of China’s commercial civilization, China’s time-honored brands carry centuries-old technical heritage and cultural accumulation, demonstrating strong market value and brand vitality. They play an extremely important role in comprehensively promoting consumption, carrying forward excellent traditional culture, and strengthening cultural confidence. Currently, China’s time-honored brands face prominent issues such as insufficient innovation capacity and underdeveloped growth levels. Although they have made initial attempts at digital transformation, most have fallen into a profound dilemma characterized by the coexistence of “superficial prosperity” and “hollow essence”. China’s time-honored brands urgently require digital and intelligent transformation to achieve dynamic adaptation between traditional craftsmanship and modern consumer demands, thereby reconstructing the narrative logic of Chinese-characteristic commercial history in the global consumer market. However, existing literature mostly discusses the role of digital technology in the innovative development of China’s time-honored brands from perspectives such as “cultural inheritance”, “strategic transformation”, and “brand innovation”, exhibiting a notable tendency towards “fragmentation”. Therefore, systematically explaining the dynamic mechanism and power system through which digital and intelligent technologies empower the innovative development of China’s time-honored brands has become an inherent theoretical demand and an urgent practical necessity. This paper focuses on the digital and intelligent transformation of China’s time-honored brand enterprises, and constructs a dynamic mechanism for their digital and intelligent transformation from three dimensions: cultural gene activation, consumption scenario innovation, and enterprise organizational restructuring. Then, based on a horizontal multi-case analysis of 10 representative time-honored brand enterprises, it summarizes the dynamic system for their digital and intelligent transformation. The study finds that digital and intelligent technology activates the cultural genes of China’s time-honored brands through the excavation of cultural symbols and the construction of commercial value; achieves consumption scenario innovation through the creation of social scenarios and intelligent scenario interactions; and realizes enterprise organizational transformation through digital and intelligent management transformation and the cultivation of digital and intelligent talent. It is recommended that China’s time-honored brand enterprises take historical and cultural genes as the starting point, utilizing digital and intelligent technology to activate the spiritual core of commercial civilization; take consumption scenario reconstruction as the hub, utilizing digital and intelligent technology to connect the value channels of the experience economy; and take enterprise organizational management as the core, utilizing digital and intelligent technology to reconstruct the ecological system of commercial operations. Compared with previous literature, the marginal contributions of this paper lie in the following aspects. Firstly, based on dynamic capability theory and the three core capabilities of integration, construction, and reconstruction of dynamic capabilities, it explores the dynamic mechanism through which digital and intelligent technologies empower the innovative development of China’s time-honored brands. Secondly, by selecting 10 representative time-honored brand enterprises from different industries for a horizontal multi-case comparative analysis, it constructs a dynamic system for digital and intelligent technology empowering their innovative development. Thirdly, it proposes countermeasures for empowering the innovative development of China’s time-honored brands with digital and intelligent technologies, providing theoretical support and practical basis for the revitalization of China’s time-honored brands and the study of Chinese commercial history. This study systematically reviews the successful experiences of digital and intelligent transformation in China’s time-honored brand enterprises, constructs a dynamic mechanism for their digital and intelligent transformation, and summarizes a dynamic system for the successful transformation of time-honored brand enterprises. It holds significant research implications for China’s time-honored brand enterprises to achieve innovative development with the aid of digital and intelligent technology.