Picture/IC photo
The Double 11 war in 2026 has not yet come, and the industry structure has been reshaped in advance. Saying goodbye to the simple traffic subsidies and price competition in previous years, this year the major leading e-commerce platforms have uniformly switched tracks and established artificial intelligence as the core growth engine of major promotions. Alibaba, Douyin, Kuaishou, and JD.com have all tightened their rules for big promotion access and traffic allocation, completely breaking the inherent perception that “AI is an exclusive tool for high-end merchants.” AI operating capabilities have officially become a hard standard for all merchants participating in Double 11. Those who do not understand AI operations will directly miss out on the core traffic and growth dividends of this big promotion.
This industry-wide AI iteration is by no means a platform to follow suit, but an inevitable upgrade spurred by drastic changes in the underlying logic of the consumer market. The “China Consumer Consumption Willingness Survey Report for the Second Quarter of 2026” shows that 79.4% of consumers will consult AI tools such as Doubao and DeepSeek before shopping. The influence of AI on consumption decisions reached 43.7%, exceeding the 42.6% of traditional media advertising for the first time.
User behavior has shifted from “active search for products” to “AI question-and-answer decision-making”, which means that the core competitiveness of merchants has completely changed. Whether products can be accurately identified, efficiently interpreted, and prioritized by AI directly determines whether the store can gain exposure and achieve transactions during major promotions.
At this point, Double 11 in 2026 has officially bid farewell to the era of extensive traffic dividends and entered a new stage of technological competition in AI refined management. In the past, merchants competed for supply, price, and manpower. Now, what they compete for is AI adaptability and intelligent operation efficiency. The core winner of this year’s Double 11 is already clear: whoever can skillfully use AI tools and adapt to the new AI consumption ecosystem will be able to seize the incremental sales volume and seize the initiative in the industry.
平臺Business conferences are held consecutively, and AI has moved from “providing tools” to “providing results”
Major platforms have implemented this user-side change directly into the merchant tools for major promotions. Tmall has launched an AI war room and an upgraded version of the business manager, which can intelligently diagnose product shortcomings and predict hot sales trends; Douyin and Kuaishou have launched global AI delivery and content generation tools to help merchants mass-produce short videos and live broadcast materials; JD.com relies on Jingmai’s AI operation center to promote the intelligent upgrade of the entire process of store operations, user operation and maintenance, and traffic matching. It is worth noting that the basic AI business tools of most platforms are open to merchants free of charge, which is intended to lower the threshold for small and medium-sized merchants to get started and force the entire merchant group to complete intelligent transformation.
The latest upgrade comes from JD.com. On September 23, JD.com announced the upgrade of the Jingmai AI Operation Center, integrating five modules: super assistant, AI expert, full-link AI diagnosis, third-party tool market, and merchant self-built tools, bringing together more than 60 AI tools, and supporting merchants to build their own personalized tools. JD.com has released the first batch of Jingmai AI expert teams. Merchants can use natural language to ask questions to AI experts to complete batch processing, automatic inspections, intelligent construction and other actions.
JD Group SEC Vice Chairman and JD Group CEO Xu Ran disclosed for the first time this year that promoting the prosperity of the merchant ecosystem is one of JD’s core strategies. During the upcoming JD 11.11, JD will increase investment in assisting merchants with more efficient and practical AI tools, driving the number of new merchants with sales exceeding one million to increase by more than 60% year-on-year. According to JD.com, the activity rate of Jingmai AI tool merchants has increased by more than 150% in the past three months.
Alimama’s incision is at the delivery end. Alimama recently launched its first AI targeted product “Wanxiangdianjing”, which uses large models to reason about consumer intentions, breaking the limitations of traditional crowd labels. The case shows that the case of a certain brand of fabric bed is quite representative: traditional advertising ideas will only target the decoration crowd, but AI identified the potential demand of the e-sports crowd for lying comfort and discovered the incremental group that had been ignored before. In the end, this part of the new customer transaction volume corresponding to this product accounted for more than 83%.
The change isn’t just in the number of tools. The AI upgrading of e-commerce can be summarized as moving from “providing tools” to “providing results”. The relevant person in charge of Jingmai AI told the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter that JD.com will connect natural language and e-commerce business logic, associate merchant portraits, operating data and industry knowledge, so that AI can continue to understand business demands in multiple rounds of dialogue; relying on the device-cloud collaboration and controlled execution mechanism, all operations require merchant authorization, and the entire task process is traceable.
Other platforms will follow suit simultaneously. Kuaishou has set the theme of this year’s Double 11 as “AI Efficiency Improvement, Global Collaboration” and invested hundreds of billions of traffic incentives and hundreds of millions of user subsidies; the intelligent digital employees launched by the platform support 24/7 online support, and merchants can complete the entire business chain of viewing, diagnosis, and operations through natural language. Douyin e-commerce has launched a compass AI question and bean bag area in the merchant backend. Qianyi Agent supports the generation of customized video materials in one sentence, and Feige Intelligent Customer Service is available for free for a limited time during the event.
Cao Lei, vice president of the Zhejiang Federation of Digital Intelligence Technology and Services and director of the e-commerce research center of the Internet Economic Society, also said that e-commerce has not been abandoned, but is being transformed by AI. AI shopping assistants in e-commerce and automated operation tools on the merchant side have begun to improve operational efficiency. This is a two-wheel drive strategy of “e-commerce + AI”, rather than a transformation from A to B.
AI acts as a shopping guide, and merchants have one more GEO task to do
The shift on the consumer side is pushing businesses back. AI shopping guides are reshaping the online shopping experience, with more and more users switching from active searches to direct questions. JD.com also mentioned at the exchange meeting that the platform has upgraded its AI-driven product management center and launched product information points as a reference for merchant operations. But writing AI as a master key will miss the other half of the facts.
Lin Zhiyong, deputy secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Association, reminded at the E-commerce AI Industry Summit that merchants should choose appropriate AI tools based on their own business needs and resource conditions, and focus on improving the efficiency of core links; at the same time, they must realize that AI tools are auxiliary means and cannot replace people’s core decision-making and innovation capabilities. They should focus on human-machine collaboration and find a balance between innovation and compliance.
Frontline concerns are more specific. The person in charge of a women’s clothing brand told the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter that many offline companies do not lack the budget and determination to invest in AI, but they are more willing to continue to pay for plug-and-play products such as “same city traffic”; for AI business tools that require long-term investment and learning, he is worried about “working in vain.” He also mentioned that AI+ e-commerce still needs to be improved in terms of personalized recommendation accuracy and algorithm interpretability.
New cost items are also appearing. Doubao Recommendation has begun to charge channel service fees based on transactions for accommodation orders, with a comprehensive rate of 12% and independent rates for each category ranging from 8.4% to 17.4%. The “toll fees” of AI channels have begun to be clearly priced, which means that merchants need to recalculate this rate into the profit model. At the same time, a new task is put on the table – structuring product titles, parameters, ingredients, and usage scenarios so that AI can “understand” your own products so that they can be recommended. The industry also calls this set of structured product operations for AI retrieval GEO (Generative‑Engineered‑Offer). Generative product operations are becoming a new required course for merchants.
There is another question that has not yet been fully discussed: When AI becomes standard equipment, will the gap between merchants who learn to use it first and those who have not yet started to use it be magnified in major sales? Yang Huaiyu, a senior Internet analyst, said that the platform provides tools and subsidies, but the actual effect of the tools is often verified by the data caliber provided by the platform, and what merchants really care about is whether it brings reusable business capabilities after the launch, not just the peak of a wave of promotions.
Double 11 has always been a testing ground for new e-commerce tools. What’s different this year is that for the first time, AI appears on both the consumer and merchant sides, and has been written into investment rules. It’s no longer a bonus, but a ticket never equals a ticket to victory. A month later, what will really be verified is not whose model is stronger, but how many methods and people can continue to be used by these tools after the big promotion is over.
Beijing News Shell Finance Reporter Cheng Zijiao
Editor Yang Juanjuan
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