Inner Mongolia Digital Human Timeline

Notes:

Inner Mongolia is actively integrating AI digital humans across public services, education, media, tourism, and business. Notable developments include the Inner Mongolia Museum’s interactive digital exhibits such as singing and Q&A with digital humans; the debut of “Zhun Xuanxuan,” the region’s first original digital human; and 24/7 AI-powered livestream government service centers in cities like Tongliao. The region has promoted AI digital humans in employment services, museum interactions, and virtual tourism, including the digital human reporter “Meng Xiaoge” on the Hulunbuir grasslands. Universities like Inner Mongolia Normal University are developing digital human academic programs, and companies such as Yili have launched ultra-realistic brand ambassador avatars.

Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, has widely implemented AI digital humans across employment, education, and industry. The city has hosted over 600 live-streamed recruitment sessions using AI avatars alongside human hosts, offering tens of thousands of job positions and attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers. AI digital humans are being used in resume screening, mock interviews, employment matchmaking, government services, virtual museum guides, and education support. Hohhot has also launched training centers, innovation hubs, and partnerships with tech companies like Lenovo and DeepSeek to support its digital economy.

The Hohhot Integrated Media Center, established in January 2023 as a government-backed public institution, unifies the city’s newspaper, TV station, and online platforms into the “Qing-Orange” system to serve as a centralized hub for multimedia content. Operating on a “one-time collection, multi-output publishing” model, it integrates print, broadcast, online, and cloud-based channels to streamline content planning, production, and distribution. Positioned as both a communication hub and “central kitchen,” it enhances Hohhot’s ability to shape public discourse, provide social services, and support economic and cultural development through a modernized, multi-platform media structure.

On August 15, 2024, in Hohhot, China Unicom launched the HaiNa AI Music Cloud Platform, the country’s first fully domestic cloud-network-integrated music creation environment, which enables AI-driven lyric writing, composing, singing, and performing across music, video, 3D/XR, and metaverse applications; the event also debuted Ge Xiaohu, a grassland-themed AI digital human singer designed with advanced voice and image synthesis to embody Inner Mongolia’s cultural heritage while showcasing the platform’s ability to merge traditional artistry with cutting-edge AI innovation.

Yili Group, officially Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co., Ltd., is China’s largest dairy producer and a global top-five dairy brand, headquartered in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, where it leverages the region’s livestock and dairy heritage as part of its identity. Since 2020, Yili has made digitalization a core strategy, launching its proprietary large AI model YILI-GPT in 2023 and subsequently creating “Jin Yi”, the first hyper-realistic digital human in China’s dairy industry, followed by a family of avatars such as Dali, Xiaoyi, Yiyi, Xiaoyou, and Xiaoqiao. These digital humans serve as brand ambassadors and consumer engagement tools, appearing in livestreams, virtual exhibitions, and product launches to embody Yili’s “digital-real integration” (phygital) strategy. Developed in-house as part of the company’s push to combine AI with immersive marketing and smart supply chain management, Yili’s digital humans are positioned as symbols of innovation.

In December 2022, Mengniu Dairy, the Inner Mongolia-based dairy giant and rival of Yili, introduced its first virtual employee “Naisi”, a hyper-realistic digital human developed in partnership with Kuaishou’s StreamLake platform, which specializes in advanced audio-video and AI solutions. Naisi was designed as a corporate-facing virtual employee capable of participating in livestreams, interacting with consumers, and representing Mengniu in brand communications, marking a significant step in the company’s digital transformation strategy. Leveraging StreamLake’s full-chain digital human technology, which combines 3D modeling, live interaction, and AI-driven engagement, Naisi embodies Mengniu’s push to modernize its customer outreach.

Huawei Cloud’s MetaStudio technology powered the deployment of digital human avatars at the 14th National Winter Sports Games in Inner Mongolia in February 2024, marking the first-ever integration of such technology in a national-level sports event. The platform was used to animate the Games’ mascots “Mongolian Color Kids” — Anda and Senu — transforming them from static images into interactive, lifelike virtual hosts capable of responding to viewer inquiries and guiding audiences through venue and event details. Impressively, MetaStudio can generate such avatars from just 3–5 minutes of video, using rapid facial feature identification, model matching, fine-tuning, and cloud-rendering acceleration to ensure realism and smooth performance.