Meituan, a leading Chinese technology and retail platform, has made significant investments in the research, development, and deployment of digital humans, positioning them as a strategic asset across its service ecosystem. The company has integrated AI-driven digital humans into various operational and consumer-facing roles, particularly targeting the service retail sector. At the 2025 Service Retail Industry Conference, Meituan officially launched its first cohort of AI digital employees, including virtual customer service agents, operations specialists, scheduling assistants, and business managers. These virtual roles are designed to streamline business operations for small and medium-sized merchants by automating customer interactions, improving scheduling accuracy, generating promotional content, and providing diagnostic insights into store performance. Early deployments in sectors such as education, home services, and events have shown strong performance improvements, including over 40% increases in lead retention and more than 20% sales boosts through 24/7 digital assistance.
The technical foundation of Meituan’s digital human initiatives is led by its Visual Intelligence Department, which conducts cutting-edge research in computer vision and AIGC (AI-Generated Content). The department’s contributions to the CVPR 2024 conference featured innovations in digital human control, image-to-video generation, and audiovisual segmentation, developed independently and in collaboration with academic partners. These technologies enhance the realism and interactivity of digital avatars, enabling their use in real-time dialog systems, content marketing, and customer service environments. Meituan's work emphasizes scalability and performance optimization, such as GPU inference architecture improvements and deployment of high-efficiency models like YOLOv6 for real-time applications.
Additionally, Meituan’s internal AI labs, including the Shenzhen Meituan Robotics Research Institute (mri.meituan.com) and various subgroups within its technology teams, support R&D into AI agent behavior, voice interaction, and virtual character personalization. Recruitment posts and technical blogs confirm active hiring for roles specializing in digital human platforms, conversational AI, and multimodal learning. Meituan’s digital human technologies are deeply embedded in both back-end systems and consumer interfaces, with applications ranging from live-streaming product sales to AI-guided shopping and 3D avatar customization. The company’s strategic outlook projects that digitalization—powered by digital humans—will grow service retail’s digital share from 9% in 2024 to 25% by 2030, potentially enabling the rise of hundreds of new national-scale brands.