Kuaishou Quietly Launches AI Shopping Assistant, Escalating the AI Shopping Guide War Among China’s E-Commerce Giants — BigGo Finance

Kuaishou Quietly Launches AI Shopping Assistant, Escalating the AI Shopping Guide War Among China’s E-Commerce Giants
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Kuaishou E-commerce quietly launched an AI shopping assistant on July 20, embedding the entry point directly into product search result pages. Users can describe their needs in natural language and add items to their cart with a single click, bypassing the need to scroll through product details or compare specifications—prioritizing extreme efficiency. This marks the first time Kuaishou has deployed AI capabilities directly to consumers, continuing the straightforward style of its “laotie” (buddy) community-driven economy. Meanwhile, giants like Alibaba, Douyin, and JD.com are also accelerating their AI shopping guide deployments, with JD.com notably integrating into Tencent’s Yuanbao mini-program ecosystem on July 15. The entire e-commerce industry is shifting from the dividends of livestreaming and shelf-based models toward AI-driven competition in matching people with products. Although Kuaishou entered the race relatively late, its approach is aggressive; whether it can break through remains to be tested by the market.

Key Elements

While the outside world is still debating how large AI models will be commercialized, Kuaishou has already embedded an AI shopping guide directly into its users’ search results pages

On July 20, Kuaishou E-commerce quietly launched its “AI Shopping Assistant,” with the entry point embedded directly into the bottom-right corner of product search result pages. Users don’t need to jump to another page or scroll through lengthy product descriptions. They simply state their needs in natural language, and the AI horizontally arranges qualifying product cards. A single tap on the shopping cart icon adds the item to their cart. This design compresses the traditional e-commerce chain of “search-browse-compare-purchase” to its absolute limit, hitting nearly every pain point of the average online shopper.

From a practical experience standpoint, Kuaishou’s AI shopping assistant demonstrates a strong utility-driven orientation. For example, in a budget-based product selection scenario, a user typing “buy iPhone 17E under 5000 yuan” prompts the AI to immediately filter out different tiers of supply: a new China-market unit at 4,499 yuan with 12-month interest-free installments, and a subsidized near-new unit at 4,299 yuan after coupons, all displayed horizontally as cards. After selecting the color and storage capacity, the user clicks the cart to add the item directly, without ever needing to enter the product detail page.

For categories like consumer electronics and home appliances that require repeated comparison, the efficiency gains are even more pronounced. When a user is torn between “OnePlus Ace 6T or iPhone 17E,” the AI directly generates a side-by-side comparison table, clearly listing core specs, final prices, sales reputation, and pros and cons. Even for vague needs like “affordable kitchen gadgets” or “travel sun protection gear,” the AI can automatically sort and recommend products by sales and reviews, saving users the hassle of flipping through category pages.

Even more thoughtful is the price-drop alert feature. If a product the user previously browsed drops in price or experiences a change in after-sales guarantees, the AI proactively pushes a notification, turning browsing history into tangible discount leads. For reputation checks, users don’t need to scroll through thousands of reviews; they can simply ask the AI to get the core points of positive and negative feedback and common pitfalls.

In fact, this isn’t Kuaishou’s first foray into AI e-commerce. Over the past year, Kuaishou’s AI capabilities were mainly hidden in merchant back-end tools—AI image-to-video, e-commerce inspiration tools, livestream clipping, and other utilities helped merchants produce an average of 1.5 million videos daily during the Singles’ Day shopping festival, driving average daily GMV of 53 million yuan (approximately $7.8 million), a year-on-year increase of 140.9%. But these “back-end tools” were hard for ordinary users to perceive. This newly launched AI shopping assistant is the first time Kuaishou has placed AI capabilities directly in front of consumers.

Moreover, Kuaishou’s approach is highly distinctive—no fancy multi-turn dialogues, no lengthy purchasing advice. It focuses on being simple and direct, precisely hitting the usage habits of users in China’s lower-tier markets. If other platforms treat AI shopping guides as “your consultant,” Kuaishou takes the efficiency route of “saving you steps,” continuing the consistent logic of its “laotie economy.”

Industry Competitive Landscape: Late but Ferocious

Looking across the entire e-commerce industry, Kuaishou’s move isn’t a first-mover play, but it’s ferocious enough

Alibaba laid out its plans the earliest. At the end of 2023, Jack Ma set the tone to fully bet on AI e-commerce, starting by arming the merchant side, with tools like Business Advisor and Dianxiaomi rolling out one by one. During the 2025 Singles’ Day period, these efforts erupted, with six AI shopping guide products launched in one go, covering categories like home furnishings, apparel, and maternal-infant products, completing semantic restructuring of 2 billion products and improving search relevance by 20%. However, the full closed-loop integration between independent AI products within the Taobao ecosystem and on-platform transactions is still being refined.

Douyin took a “blooming outside the wall” route. In October 2025, Doubao was integrated into the Douyin Mall. Users consulting Doubao for beauty or digital product recommendations would receive product cards with prices and sales data directly, and clicking would jump to Douyin to place an order—essentially creating an external search traffic entry for its e-commerce business. Subsequently, Douyin also launched the Doubao Phone Assistant, testing cross-app price comparison and ordering capabilities, with ambitions extending beyond its own ecosystem.

JD.com directly latched onto Tencent. Just five days before Kuaishou’s launch—on July 15—JD.com’s AI Agent and Tencent Yuanbao officially connected their mini-program ecosystems, making JD.com the first comprehensive e-commerce platform to access Yuanbao. When users ask Yuanbao questions like “which refrigerator under 2000 yuan is the quietest” or “recommend a cologne for a guy,” the AI provides purchasing advice while simultaneously popping up JD.com product cards. A click directly jumps to the JD.com mini-program to place an order, with logistics and after-sales fully handled by JD.com, all without switching apps. Beyond Tencent Yuanbao, JD.com has also connected to mobile AI agents like Huawei’s Xiaoyi and OPPO’s Xiaobu via the A2A model, essentially covering all mainstream AI entry points. Unlike Douyin’s “own AI funnels to own marketplace” model, JD.com is taking a “cast a wide net, capture entry points” approach, still relying on its supply chain and fulfillment capabilities to reap benefits, with AI serving merely as a traffic pipeline.

Why Kuaishou Is Entering Now

Kuaishou’s decision to enter the consumer-facing AI shopping guide arena at this moment is essentially driven by growth pressure

Financial report data shows that Kuaishou’s e-commerce GMV reached 1.6 trillion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 15%. While this growth rate seems decent, compared to the 78% growth rate in 2021, it has plummeted by 63 percentage points over five years. The user side is also facing a slowdown: average daily active users in 2025 were 410 million, a year-on-year increase of only 2.76%; in the first quarter of 2025, monthly active buyers were 135 million, with a visible gap compared to Douyin E-commerce. Industry estimates generally place Douyin’s 2025 e-commerce GMV at around 4.4 trillion yuan, roughly 2.75 times that of Kuaishou.

Traffic dividends are drying up, shelf-based e-commerce hasn’t created significant differentiation after several years, and white-label goods and industrial belts remain the foundation. Against this backdrop, AI becomes one of the few new stories to tell—internally boosting conversion rates, externally releasing imaginative potential to the capital markets. In the first quarter of 2026, Kuaishou’s revenue was 33.72 billion yuan (approximately $5.0 billion), a year-on-year increase of 3.4%, with Huatai Securities forecasting a full-year growth rate of only about 4.5%. AI investment is still burning cash; Kling AI’s Q1 revenue exceeded 650 million yuan (approximately $96.2 million), but the overall business is still in the investment phase. E-commerce, as the core business, must step up.

Capital Market Perspective: AI Cost Panic Is Overblown

Just as Kuaishou is pushing into AI e-commerce, the capital market’s attitude toward China’s internet sector is also shifting

According to Wind Chaser Trading Desk, Bernstein’s latest research report argues that the market’s pessimistic interpretation of AI inference costs has been severely distorted. Coupled with catalysts like the release of Tencent’s Hy3 model and Alibaba Cloud’s growth exceeding expectations, sector valuations have rebounded from the historical trough levels of 2022-2023

Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu pointed out in the report that some previously circulating AI cost narratives—such as platforms needing to indefinitely subsidize inference costs—are “grossly inaccurate and excessively pessimistic.” The core logic is that the explosive growth of inference costs presupposes that agent-based transaction volumes and GMV take off simultaneously. Data shows that chatbot-style conversations typically consume only a few hundred tokens, while agent-based transactions consume an average of about 50,000 tokens. In other words, token consumption only grows exponentially when agent-based transaction volumes truly scale up.

Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud’s Q2 revenue growth accelerated to the mid-40% range, and e-commerce profits were also better than expected, jointly driving a sector-wide rebound. Bernstein maintains “Outperform” ratings on Tencent, Alibaba, NetEase, JD.com, and BOSS Zhipin. Among them, Tencent’s target price is HK$780 (approximately $99.47), implying roughly 69% upside from the current share price

The report particularly emphasized that the trillions of yuan in GMV within WeChat mini-programs represent a core monetization opportunity for Tencent’s AI, achieved through merchant-side monetization. This stands in stark contrast to the pessimism in Western markets, where investors have largely given up on consumer-side AI monetization expectations

Impact and Outlook

Whether the AI shopping assistant can help Kuaishou break through remains to be seen. Looking across the entire industry, AI shopping guides are still in a “nice-to-have” phase—boosting conversion rates by a few percentage points, saving a few steps—far from disrupting the industry. Whether users will develop the habit of “saying a word to AI and buying something” also needs time to verify

But one trend is already clear: the dividends of livestreaming e-commerce are exhausted, the shelf-based e-commerce landscape is largely set, and the core of the next round of competition is who can use AI to push the efficiency of matching people with products even higher. Alibaba has its supply chain, ByteDance has its traffic, Tencent and JD.com are allied, and Kuaishou guards its “laotie” base. Each holds its own cards, and each has its own weaknesses.

This tough battle for AI e-commerce has only just begun

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