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

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

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JD.com revealed that more than 70,000 sellers are now using its AI digital humans as live-stream commerce hosts, with the cost of digital human streaming having fallen to one-tenth that of a real person and 2025 GMV reaching tens of billions of yuan. An executive from JD.com's digital human and AI-generated content department told Yicai Global that expectations around the appearance and capabilities of digital humans are increasing and vendors want them to become increasingly like real hosts, with more work to be done to improve how digital humans interact with viewers so as to boost audience stickiness in livestream studios. Live commerce has become a major e-commerce sales channel in China but has historically been gated by labor costs, with professional hosts, filming studios, sound engineers, and makeup artists preventing small and mid-sized sellers from participating at scale. JD.com first used a digital avatar of founder Richard Liu in April 2024, with the "Cai Xiao Dong Ge" avatar recording 20 million views in its first hour and 50 million yuan in total sales, before making the digital human feature free for all sellers in December 2025, which drove the rapid expansion to over 70,000 sellers by March 2026. The Yanxi Digital Human Platform is built on JD.com's proprietary ChatRhino large language model and JD Cloud infrastructure, integrating speech recognition, multi-turn dialogue, natural voice generation, and human-like facial expressions and body movements, with the ability to generate 32-second 1080p high-definition video in real time and product recommendation accuracy exceeding 90 percent. Beyond the 70,000 seller deployment, JD.com also announced plans to build what it described as the world's largest and most comprehensive embodied intelligence data collection centre, mobilizing more than 100,000 employees and up to 500,000 external participants to collect five million hours of real-world video data within one year, ten million hours within two years, and one million hours of robot motion data. Looking ahead, JD.com's JoyInside embodied intelligence brand is deepening partnerships with nearly 100 home appliance and furniture brands and more than 40 robotics and AI toy brands.