China’s ‘618’ shopping festival, the mid-year sales event named for 18 June and now stretched across several weeks, has become two things at once this year: a showcase for how thoroughly AI has been threaded through online retail, and a reminder of how cautious the Chinese consumer still is. The technology is everywhere. The demand it is meant to unlock is more reluctant.
The AI story is the one the platforms want told. Major e-commerce companies have embedded AI across the supply chain, from logistics and pricing to customer service, with 2026 widely described in industry coverage as a breakthrough year for the technology in online retail.
Alibaba has been the most visible, connecting its Qwen large language model to Taobao so that shoppers can search, compare, and buy by chatting with an assistant that also handles virtual try-ons and price tracking.
That integration is not a pilot. Alibaba wired Qwen into Taobao’s catalogue of more than four billion products, in what has been called the largest agentic-commerce launch yet from a Chinese platform.
Qwen reached around 300 million monthly active users earlier in the year, and China is, by most accounts, further down this road than anywhere in the West.
