At the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting, JD.com CEO Xu Randong told a panel that 2025 had been an inflection point for consumer-facing artificial intelligence. He described a dramatic rise in demand—searches for “AI” on JD’s platform rose roughly 100-fold year-on-year—and said AI capabilities are now embedding into phones, wearables, home appliances and even livestreaming “digital humans”.
The company’s internal metrics back the claim. JD reported overall smart-device sales more than doubled in 2025, with smart robots and smart glasses rising by roughly threefold and tenfold respectively. Digital-person livestreams on JD’s platform generated more than RMB 2.4 billion in gross merchandise value during last year’s Singles’ Day, and a flurry of AI toys and hardware lines repeatedly sold out after initial launches.
JD is pushing these products through a package of organisational and commercial moves. The retailer has created a “Chameleon” business unit to centralise JoyAI, the JoyInside hardware brand and digital-person initiatives; it says JoyInside has partnered with over 40 hardware makers. JD also emphasises a “super supply chain” and C2M (consumer-to-manufacturer) reverse-customisation model to accelerate product iteration and bring AI features into mass-market devices.
The consumer push sits atop a deeper technology play. Founder Liu Qiangdong’s renewed public engagement has coincided with investments in six embodied-intelligence startups and an upgrade to JD’s Exploration Research Institute, which will recruit AI scientists and set up joint labs with universities. JD has already merchandised humanoid robots and other embodied devices on its platform and opened a physical store for a robot maker in Beijing.
The move is both commercial and strategic. Domestic rivals including Alibaba, ByteDance and Meituan are racing to become the primary AI consumer gateway, and control of that gateway will determine future flows of traffic, data and spending. JD’s edge is its logistics, manufacturing relationships and retail reach, but hardware is capital-intensive, margins can be thin, and the company faces upstream constraints such as chip supply and downstream issues of trust, safety and content moderation as AI capabilities proliferate for consumers.