Worrying: AI is outperforming human salespeople on Chinese e-commerce sites
What's the story
A Shanghai-based marketing firm, PLTFRM, has deployed "virtual human" AI-powered sales avatars on Chinese e-commerce platforms like Alibaba's Taobao and Pinduoduo. These avatars are powered by Baidu's AI video models and DeepSeek's large language models to generate scripts for selling a variety of products from printers to wet wipes. The company has deployed around 30 such avatars across these platforms. According to PLTFRM co-founder Alexandre Ouairy, their virtual sales bots are consistently outperforming human salespersons for companies that use them.
Performance
AI avatars are very successful
Brother, a company that has used these AI avatars, said its avatar sold $2,500 worth of printers in just two hours and increased its livestream sales by 30% since switching to AI avatars. "Every morning we check the data to see how much our AI host sold while we were asleep," Brother said in a press release.
Concerns
Concerns about job displacement
The success of these AI avatars has raised concerns about their potential to replace human salespeople who rely on livestreaming for a living. To note, PLTFRM's avatars are not allowed on Douyin, China's version of TikTok, which has been more cautious about adopting AI-generated salespeople than platforms focused on shopping. In the US, AI-generated influencers have already gained immense popularity with deepfaked and AI-generated ads appearing across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Testing
Interest from western companies
Ouairy revealed that US and European companies have shown interest in creating similar salespersons for US social media platforms. PLTFRM has tested its technology on YouTube, TikTok, and with posiFacebooktive results. However, the company is currently focused on China as its avatars are trained on Chinese AI models and might sound more robotic when speaking other languages.
Functionality
Hybrid streams gaining popularity
The Brother "virtual human" is modeled on an actual human sales representative for Brother in China. PLTFRM sometimes does hybrid streams where the real human salesperson works for some hours before switching with the AI. This way, they can keep their livestreams running 24/7, 365 days a year, which is an effective marketing strategy. In 2024, over one-third of all e-commerce sales in China were estimated to have happened on livestreams.