Central air conditionings (CACs) deployed in large-scale commercial buildings have consumed a large amount of energy in cities. Growing attention has been expressed in their operating efficiency improvement and demand response (DR) participation to facilitate energy conservation and supply–demand balance. To tackle these challenges, a chance constrained economic dispatch approach is developed for CACs, aimed at optimizing their operation scheduling while accounting for DR participation. Firstly, the economic dispatch framework is established to harness capacity reserves, thermal inertias, and chance constraints to deal with cooling load uncertainties, accompanied by a three-stage DR strategy aimed at augmenting response potential. On this basis, the operation scheduling of CACs is formulated as an optimization problem to minimize overall operating costs considering DR incomes. To solve the problem, the energy-temperature transformation model is developed to quantify available thermal inertias and DR capacities within user comforts. Additionally, chance constraints are converted to specific reserve requirements, to prevent inappropriate dispatches caused by severe but rare forecast errors. Furthermore, the feasible regulation region is designed to coordinate capacity reserves and thermal inertias in response to cooling load forecast errors. Lastly, case studies are conducted using realistic data from commercial buildings, validating the effectiveness of dispatch on operating efficiency improvement, forecast uncertainty accommodation, as well as contributions to DR provision.