The salesperson hawking Brother printers on Taobao works hard—like, really hard. At any time of the day, even when there’s no audience on the Chinese ecommerce platform, the same woman wearing a white shirt and black skirt is always livestreaming, boasting about the various features of different office printers. She has a phone in one hand and often checks it as if to read a sales script or monitor the viewer comments coming in.
“My friends, I’ve gotta plug this game-changing office tool that can double your workplace efficiency, ” the salesperson said during one recent broadcast, trying to achieve the delicate balance between friendliness and precision that has come to define the billion-dollar livestream ecommerce industry in China. Occasionally, she greeted the invisible audience. “I’m seeing a lot of friends coming into the livestream hello this is Brother printer’s official flagship store,” she told them.
Unless you pay close attention, it can be hard to catch her glitches. But every few minutes, the salesperson will suddenly freeze her body for several seconds while her lips keep moving—it looks out of sync. That glitch, and some of the salesperson’s other stilted movements, are telltale signs that she’s not a human, but instead a “virtual human” AI-powered salesperson avatar that streams 24/7. Her Taobao broadcast includes a disclosure that it’s an “AI streamer” in the lower half of the screen, but it’s easy to miss because it’s almost entirely covered by the comment features in the app.
The AI salesperson was created by a Shanghai-based marketing company called PLTFRM, which says it has deployed around 30 similar avatars across Chinese ecommerce sites like Alibaba’s Taobao and Pinduoduo, the sister site of Temu. These avatars, which rely on AI video models from Baidu and large language models from DeepSeek to generate scripts, sell everything from printers to wet wipes. They are programmed to share basic information about what they’re selling, as well as greet the audience and respond to questions.
Alexandre Ouairy, the cofounder of PLTFRM, says that its virtual sales bots are consistently outselling human salespeople for the companies who use them. Brother claimed in a press release that its AI avatar sold $2,500 worth of printers in its first two hours online, and that its livestream sales since switching to AI avatars are up 30 percent. “Every morning, we check the data to see how much our AI host sold while we were asleep,” Brother said in the release. “It’s now part of our daily routine.”
The deployment and early success of these AI avatars raises questions about whether they will displace people who make a living by selling products while livestreaming on platforms like TikTok or by doing affiliate marketing on TikTok Shop. PLTFRM’s AI avatars are currently not allowed on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, which has been more reluctant to adopt AI-generated salespeople than platforms more squarely focused on shopping.
But in the United States, AI-generated influencers have already become wildly popular, AI-generated videos regularly go viral across the internet, and deepfaked and AI-generated ads are all over YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. It’s not hard to imagine a future where social media becomes an endless stream of AI-generated content interspersed with always-on, AI-generated avatars selling us stuff. Over the last few years, the technology required to make “virtual humans” like this has become far better, more accessible, and cheaper.
