JD.com's AI Digital Human Sellers Surpass 70,000, Fundamentally Changing the Cost Structure of Live Commerce

JD.com Reveals Over 70,000 Sellers Using Digital Humans

Over 70,000 Sellers Use JD.Com's Digital Humans for Hosting E-Commerce Livestreams

JD.com reveals over 70,000 sellers use its digital humans for live streaming commerce

On March 25, 2026, at a press conference on AI progress, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com (Jingdong Group) revealed that over 70,000 sellers now use its AI digital humans as livestream commerce hosts. The cost of digital human livestreaming has dropped to one-tenth that of human hosts, and 2025 GMV (gross merchandise volume) reached tens of billions of yuan (billions of dollars in scale).

JD.com made this digital human feature free for all sellers in December 2025, achieving explosive adoption in just three months.

Challenges in China's Live Commerce Market and AI Solutions

China's live commerce market is projected to reach 8.16 trillion yuan (over $1 trillion) in 2026, establishing itself as a major e-commerce sales channel. However, live commerce has had a significant bottleneck: labor costs. The expenses for professional hosts, filming studios, sound engineers, and makeup artists had been preventing small and mid-sized sellers from entering the space.

JD.com solved this challenge using its proprietary LLM "ChatRhino" and JD Cloud's "Yanxi Digital Human Platform." Yanxi is a multimodal AI platform that integrates speech recognition (ASR), multi-turn dialogue, natural voice generation, and human-like facial expressions and body movements.

This trend extends beyond JD.com. In June 2025, Chinese influencer Luo Yonghao conducted a livestream using a digital avatar powered by Baidu's AI model, generating 55 million yuan (approximately $7.65 million) in sales over 7 hours. Across the Chinese e-commerce industry, AI digital humans have moved beyond the experimental phase and are becoming full-fledged infrastructure.

Yanxi Digital Human Technology and Track Record

The widespread adoption of JD.com's digital human technology stems from incremental technological evolution and accumulated results.

In April 2024, JD.com conducted a livestream using a digital avatar of founder Richard Liu (Liu Qiangdong). The avatar "Cai Xiao Dong Ge" appeared in JD Home Appliances and JD Supermarket streaming rooms, recording 20 million views within the first hour and 50 million yuan in total sales. This success significantly boosted the awareness and credibility of digital humans.

On the technical side, the Yanxi platform features the following capabilities:

• Multimodal processing: Handles text, audio, images, and video across modalities, generating 32-second 1080p high-definition video in real time
• Zero-shot inference: Capable of introducing new products without prior training
• High-precision recommendations: Product recommendation accuracy exceeds 90%, with 90% of common user questions answered automatically
• Conversion improvement: Increased off-peak order conversion rates by 30%, achieving sales performance exceeding 80% of human hosts

However, JD.com's digital human division also noted that "there are still challenges in further improving the quality of viewer interactions and increasing retention rates in live studios." Sellers need to upload more detailed data, including product after-sales service information, to expand the digital human's knowledge base and improve dialogue quality -- a collaborative effort is required.

JD.com's AI Strategy Beyond Digital Humans

What deserves attention in this announcement goes beyond the digital human adoption numbers. JD.com simultaneously announced plans to build "the world's largest and most comprehensive embodied intelligence data collection center," leveraging its strengths in retail, logistics, industrial operations, food delivery, and home services.

The plan mobilizes over 100,000 internal employees and up to 500,000 external participants, with a target of collecting 5 million hours of real-world video data within one year and 10 million hours within two years. Simultaneously, the collection of 1 million hours of robot motion data is underway, positioning this as "the largest data collection campaign in history."

Additionally, the embodied intelligence brand "JoyInside" is deepening partnerships with approximately 100 home appliance and furniture brands and over 40 robotics and AI toy brands. JoyInside 2.0 functions as the "brain" providing large language model-driven interaction capabilities to robot and hardware manufacturers, laying the groundwork for AI to expand beyond digital spaces into the physical world.

Impact and Practical Implications for E-Commerce Businesses

The impact demonstrated by JD.com's case can be organized across three dimensions.

Cost revolution. Digital human deployment costs have dropped to the level of a few thousand yuan (tens of thousands of yen). Studios, sound equipment, makeup, and talent acquisition are all unnecessary, making 24/7 livestreaming realistic even for small and mid-sized sellers. JD.com's free offering is an extreme example, but similar AI host features are expanding on Taobao and Douyin (TikTok China) as well.

Late-night opportunities. Digital humans can cover time slots when human hosts don't stream. The 30% conversion rate improvement during off-peak hours challenges the mindset that "time without streaming equals missed opportunity."

Data quality determines competitiveness. Digital human dialogue quality depends on seller-provided data. Building out product information, FAQs, and after-sales service information is the new competitive axis that determines AI live commerce results.

In the Japanese market as well, with TikTok Shop's full-scale deployment and Yahoo! Shopping's live feature enhancements underway, AI host technology is highly likely to emerge as an adoption option in the near future. Advancing "product data structuring" and "FAQ organization" at this stage serves as preparation for the AI live commerce era.

Summary

The figure of over 70,000 stores using JD.com's digital humans demonstrates that AI live commerce has transitioned from "experiments by select advanced companies" to "a standard feature of e-commerce infrastructure." The track record of one-tenth costs, 30% conversion rate improvement, and tens of billions of yuan in GMV proves the economic viability of this technology.

Furthermore, JD.com's move into embodied intelligence data collection as the next frontier suggests that "digital humans" will not remain mere livestreaming tools but will converge with physical-world robotics. For e-commerce businesses, the time has come to recognize AI live commerce readiness as a critical theme that will determine future competitiveness.