You must be aware about our earlier report where we mentioned that live streaming is coming to the world of e-commerce and it has already become a huge part of e-commerce in southeast asian markets such as China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and others and we are seeing that it is coming to parts of Indian subcontinent as well. Live streaming e-commerce is the act of selling products by doing livestreams where the product is showcased on camera and people are told about the benefits of that product. This is similar to retail stores where you can experience the products before buying. Here, the convenience is that you can see the product on livestream right from your home and can order it online.
However, there is a new problem that has risen with the livestream e-commerce market in China due to AI. It is reported that Chinese e-commerce livestream market is facing disruption as people are using AI hosts in order to produce content round-the-clock as these AI systems can work 24×7. However, the whole point of doing livestreams was to showcase the product in real life with real personality but the AI hosts don’t solve that problem.
It is reported that “New generative AI-powered virtual hosts could disrupt the jobs of more than 400,000 human live-streamers across platforms such as Alibaba Group Holding’s Taobao Live, Tencent Holdings’ WeChat, ByteDance-owned Douyin and Kuaishou Technology“. Obviously, it is mentioned that “the cost of a virtual host to run the online marketing campaigns of small vendors and major brands is much lower than that of a human live-streamer” which means that people are inclined to use AI instead of real humans”. A service provider in China “offers a virtual host for 500 yuan (US$70) each month to appear in either short videos or live-streaming sessions.” In contrast, “the typical cost for a human host and renting a physical studio would average at about 50,000 yuan per month” as per the report. It is also known that “A number of major brands involved in China’s live-streaming e-commerce market have already expressed interest in experimenting with generative AI-driven virtual hosts”.
