More Than 70,000 JD.com Sellers Use Its AI Digital Human Hosts for Livestream Selling at One-Tenth the Cost of a Human Host

More than 70,000 merchants are using JD.com's AI digital human hosts for livestreamed online sales, the company said at a press conference on its artificial intelligence progress in March 2026, Yicai reported. JD.com made the avatars free to all of its merchants in December 2025. According to JD.com, the cost of using a digital human as a livestream host has fallen to one-tenth that of a real person, and the gross merchandise volume generated by digital human hosts reached tens of billions of yuan in 2025. An executive from JD.com's digital human and AI-generated content department told Yicai that merchants' expectations of the avatars' appearance and abilities are rising and that vendors want them to behave more like real hosts. JD.com plans more work on how the digital humans interact with viewers to keep audiences in livestream studios for longer. The executive said this depends not only on technical upgrades but also on data: merchants need to upload more after-sales information about the products they sell so the digital hosts can expand their knowledge base and answer viewers' questions better.