At 3 a.m. in a Hangzhou studio, a skincare livestream is still running. The host never blinks, never asks for a break, and has explained the same serum 400 times — because she is not human. She is a digital human (数字人), a real-time rendered AI presenter, and she is becoming one of the most deployed AI applications in Chinese retail.
The shift is no longer experimental. During JD's (京东) 2025 "618" shopping festival, more than 17,000 brands ran livestreams fronted by JD's AI digital hosts, lifting platform conversion rates by about 30% and driving over ¥14 billion (≈ US$2.0B / HK$10.9B) in incremental GMV. The hosts ran 24/7, and JD estimated their operating cost at roughly one-tenth of a human presenter.
Key takeaways
- China's digital-human (数字人) core market was projected at ¥48.06 billion (≈ US$6.8B / HK$37.5B) for 2025, up from ¥20.52 billion (≈ US$2.9B) in 2023, according to iiMedia Research (艾媒咨询).
- JD's AI hosts served 17,000+ brands in the 2025 "618" festival, contributing >¥14B (≈ US$2.0B) in incremental GMV at about one-tenth the cost of human hosts.
- A national rule now requires machine-generated content — including digital-human livestreams — to be explicitly labeled, effective September 1, 2025.
- The value is shifting from "looks real" to "can explain the product and close the loop," with human hosts kept for new launches and complex interaction.
From demo reels to storefronts
Digital-human presenters have been around for years, but the economics only turned favorable recently. Lower model-training costs and better multimodal large models (大模型) let a host speak naturally, react to comments, and switch among a dozen languages without a film crew. JD says a single digital host can sustain the output of roughly a dozen human presenters during long sessions.
The 2024 "618" festival was the warm-up: JD's Yanxi (云言犀) digital-human system appeared in 5,000+ brand livestreams, accumulated 400,000+ hours of airtime, and drew 100 million+ viewers. By 2025 the format had scaled from a few celebrity "digital twins" — JD's own founder Liu Qiangdong (刘强东) got a broadcast-ready avatar in April 2024 — to thousands of small and mid-size merchants who simply could not staff overnight shifts.
The labeling line
As the technology crossed the "is this real?" threshold, regulators stepped in. On March 14, 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室), together with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the National Radio and Television Administration, published the Measures for Labeling Content Produced by Generative and Synthetic AI (《人工智能生成合成内容标识办法》). The rules took effect on September 1, 2025, and require both visible labels (text, sound, or graphics a user can perceive) and invisible metadata labels on synthetic text, images, audio, video, and virtual scenes.
For e-commerce, that means a digital-human host must be identifiable as AI. The intent is not to ban the technology but to keep the "who is selling me this?" question answerable — a constraint that pushes vendors toward transparency rather than deception.
What the numbers really say
The ¥14B (≈ US$2.0B / HK$10.9B) figure is JD's own incremental GMV from digital-human livestreams during one festival; it is a platform-reported number, not an audited industry total. The ¥48.06 billion (≈ US$6.8B / HK$37.5B) market estimate comes from iiMedia Research and covers the entire digital-human sector — virtual influencers, customer-service avatars, and broadcast hosts — not livestream commerce alone. Both are directional, not definitive.
According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), the deployment lesson from China's retail AI is that digital humans win on consistency and cost, not on charm: "The interesting move is not replacing the star host, but putting a tireless, compliant assistant in every off-peak hour so the human can focus on the moments that actually convert."
Honest limitations
This article relies on platform-disclosed figures from JD and a single market-research estimate from iiMedia; neither is independently audited. Conversion and GMV uplift are attributed to digital-human hosts but are confounded by broader "618" promotional spending. The labeling rule is national policy, but enforcement depth across the millions of daily livestreams remains uneven and hard to verify from outside. I have not assessed consumer-sentiment data or return rates, which would be needed to judge whether the GMV is "quality" revenue. Cross-platform comparisons (Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou) are mentioned only where reported, and their internal numbers were not independently confirmed.
What readers can do now
- If you run a store or a brand in China, treat a digital-human host as a 24/7 fill-in for off-peak hours and standardized SKUs, not as a replacement for launches that need trust and nuance.
- Before deploying, check the September 1, 2025 labeling rule and add both the visible "AI host" marker and the metadata tag — non-compliance is a real legal risk, not a footnote.
- Judge any vendor pitch by incremental GMV and return rate together, not by view counts; ask for a controlled A/B test on a single product line before scaling spend.