Kuaishou Launches AI Digital Staff for Merchants: Eight Agents That Diagnose Stores and Run Video, Livestreams and After-Sales
How Kuaishou's AI digital staff in the Kuaishou Shop merchant workbench work, from eight agent roles to a diagnose-and-execute loop, how they compare with Alibaba, JD.com and Meituan, and what it means for e-commerce operators.
Key Takeaways
- Kuaishou has added "AI digital staff" to the Kuaishou Shop merchant workbench, the back office its e-commerce sellers use to run their stores. Eight agents, a virtual store manager plus seven specialists, handle everything from store diagnosis to posting videos, preparing livestreams and resolving after-sales issues.
- The target is the small seller who runs a shop alone or part-time. The design goes beyond diagnosis to a closed loop of diagnose, recommend, execute and review, and handing seller-side operations to AI agents is now standard across China's major e-commerce platforms.
- The published results, however, come from cases Kuaishou picked itself. For e-commerce operators elsewhere, the question is how much to delegate, and where to keep human judgment, once marketplaces ship operations agents as a default feature.
Eight AI Staff Inside the Kuaishou Shop Back Office
Kuaishou's merchant workbench now offers a team of AI digital staff, from a virtual store manager to video, livestream and after-sales agents, that diagnose a shop and act for the merchant.
pandaily.com"Why did traffic drop over the past seven days?" "How do refunds look this week?" When a merchant asks in plain language, the system pulls store data, tools and platform rules and routes the job to the right agent. According to Pandaily, that is the basic behavior of Kuaishou's new AI digital staff.
They live in the Kuaishou Shop merchant workbench, where sellers on Kuaishou's e-commerce platform manage their stores. Merchants can call them up on the PC workbench, through an AI mode in the app, or from an AI operations widget on PC, at any hour. An "AI operations hub" interprets what the merchant wants and assigns the work, and eight roles sit beneath it.
| Role | Main tasks |
|---|---|
| Virtual store manager | Whole-store diagnosis; suggests moves for new-customer conversion, repeat purchases, campaign sign-ups and product title fixes |
| Data specialist | Answers questions on sales, traffic and refunds and traces the cause of anomalies |
| Video specialist | Diagnoses short videos, picks products, generates finished clips in one step, posts and promotes them automatically |
| Livestream specialist | Scheduling, product selection, scripts, previews and post-show reviews |
| After-sales specialist | Looks up cases, explains platform rulings on disputes and suggests fixes for high refund rates |
| Customer service specialist | Analyzes response and satisfaction rates and complaint chats |
| Fulfillment specialist | Watches for logistics problems |
| Compliance (assurance) specialist | Explains violation risks and why a shop's experience score dropped |
Kuaishou E-commerce described the same structure in its mid-October Double 11 briefing: a "virtual store manager" oversees the whole store and diagnoses problems, while "digital specialists" for data, fulfillment, assurance, customer service, livestreaming, video and after-sales each cover their own area.
In July we covered Kuaishou's consumer-facing AI shopping assistant, built into its product search results. That AI helps buyers find products. The digital staff take over the seller's store operations. Same company, entirely different audience.
From Diagnosis to Doing the Work
What matters most here is not the number of roles but the decision to go all the way to execution. Kuaishou describes the system as a closed loop: diagnose the problem, recommend a strategy, carry it out on the merchant's behalf, then review the data. That is where it parts ways with older assistants that stop at an analytics report.
The execution rests on a large set of automation tools behind the workbench. Kuaishou E-commerce's October 26 overview of its AI product lineup (IT Home) shows that nearly every component an agent needs to act is already in place.
Start with products and traffic. A one-click "bulk listing" option at signup picks products from a sourcing market and lists them automatically, which Kuaishou says cuts the time from opening a store to having products live from hours to minutes. Merchants who enroll in "AI video hosting" get short shoppable videos generated from their listed products and posted every day. In the Magnetic Engine Jinniu ad tool, merchants describe what they want in chat and get a full campaign plan, then change products, budgets or bids in the same conversation.
For livestreams, a "one-click AI go-live" feature prepares the broadcast plan, product lineup, sales scripts and recommended time slot, and the merchant only has to confirm. In affiliate distribution, where sellers pay influencers commission to sell their goods, the AI creates plans, adjusts commission rates and sends sales invitations to influencers.
Notably, this automation runs inside limits the merchant sets. Affiliate auto-management works only within the product range, maximum commission rate and influencer filters the merchant specifies. The after-sales "AI return recovery" feature follows merchant-defined conditions to decide automatically whether to offer a small compensation to talk a buyer out of a return, and which compensation to apply. People set the permissions and the budget, and the AI makes repeated decisions inside them. The basic pattern for delegating transactions to agents has arrived on the seller side too.
The back end is covered as well: AI-driven label printing and automatic shipping, managed after-sales handling and a review assistant, all aimed at absorbing the surge in orders and returns during major sales without extra staff. Each digital staff role acts as a coordinator that calls these tools from a single conversational entry point.
Why Part-Time Sellers Are the Target
The merchants in the coverage are specific. A part-time clothing seller compares the day's exposure, clicks and refunds against the previous day every evening, and lets the agent post videos automatically while she is at her day job. A tea supplier said it has largely stopped hiring video editors.
Kuaishou has reasons to focus on this group. In its Q2 2026 earnings commentary, the company said new merchant sign-ups grew nearly 10% from the previous quarter and that more than 850,000 merchants used its free AI business tools in the first half of 2026. Most new sellers cannot staff separate roles for operations, filming, livestreaming, advertising and customer service.
Kuaishou's Q4 merchant policy, released in October, points the same way. It pairs AI business tools with incentives such as zero-deposit store openings for eligible merchants, covering up to five stores under one business license. Bring in more sellers who cannot hire staff, then use AI to keep their stores running. The digital staff are best read as part of Kuaishou's merchant acquisition strategy.
Alibaba, JD.com and Meituan Are Moving the Same Way
Handing seller operations to AI agents is not unique to Kuaishou. China's major platforms have converged on it over the past year.
Alibaba moved first. For Double 11 in 2025, it added an AI Store Manager and six "AI employees" to Taobao's merchant business assistant, and more than 5 million merchants reportedly used Taobao and Tmall AI tools in daily operations. In March 2026, Tmall said it would give every merchant a 24/7 AI agent team, and reported that its AI customer service tool Dianxiaomi lifted conversion by 30% in a pilot with 200,000 merchants.
In July, JD.com launched the Jingmai AI Business Center and opened 22 AI tools to all merchants, describing multi-agent collaboration and A2A (agent-to-agent) connections that take merchants from diagnosis to fully managed store operations. In a different sector, Meituan's food delivery arm announced in October that it would offer restaurants a free AI store manager nationwide.
| Platform | Merchant AI and its form | Published scale or claims | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kuaishou (Kuaishou Shop) | AI digital staff (virtual store manager plus seven specialists) | 850,000+ merchants used free AI business tools in H1 2026 (digital staff usage not disclosed) | October 2026 |
| Taobao and Tmall (Alibaba) | AI Store Manager and six AI employees; 24/7 AI agent team | 5M+ merchants used AI tools during Double 11 2025; Dianxiaomi lifted conversion 30% in pilot | October 2025 to March 2026 |
| JD.com | Jingmai AI Business Center (multi-agent collaboration and A2A) | 22 AI tools opened to all merchants, addressing 50+ operating issues | July 2026 |
| Meituan Waimai (restaurants) | Free AI store manager (diagnosis, store checks, menus, new-store support) | Tens of thousands of small merchants used it before national rollout | October 2026 |
Seen side by side, Kuaishou is following rather than leading. If there is a difference, it is that video and livestreaming get their own dedicated roles, fitting a platform where short video and live commerce drive sales. For sellers whose traffic depends on posting video daily and staying on air, being able to delegate exactly those tasks is the reason to use it.
The Published Numbers Are Hand-Picked
Judging from the promoter's announcements alone is risky. The cases Kuaishou published on October 20 (IT Home) include a womenswear seller who earned more than RMB 50,000 in additional sales with the AI video tool, and a streamer whose per-session sales rose 452% with a livestream assistant AI. All of these are individual success stories Kuaishou selected. Average results and user numbers for the digital staff have not been disclosed. Pandaily made a similar note about Meituan's AI store manager, saying the figures came from selected trial merchants and had not been independently verified.
Pricing is also unclear. Kuaishou says 850,000 merchants used its "free AI business tools," but the price of the digital staff themselves, and whether they will be charged for later, has not been disclosed.
Another issue is responsibility for automatically generated content. The more videos an AI produces and posts every day, the more room there is for exaggerated claims or misleading product depictions to slip through. Rival Douyin said in September 2025 that it had taken down videos and removed accounts of merchants who used AI to create false product presentations and fabricated reviews, and it requires creators to label AI-generated content. Delegating posting to an agent does not shift the liability: when something goes wrong, the merchant answers for it.
What E-Commerce Operators Should Prepare For
China's experience does not transfer directly to other markets. Still, marketplaces and platforms building operations agents into their seller dashboards is a trend that will spread sooner or later. Three things are worth settling now.
First, define the scope and limits of delegation in numbers. Kuaishou's affiliate auto-management and return recovery both let people set the commission ceiling or compensation conditions while the AI acts inside them. If you put into words and numbers how much discretion an AI can have over ad budgets, discount depth and return compensation, you can adopt such tools as soon as they arrive.
Second, get the data that feeds diagnosis in order. The digital staff diagnose by matching store data on sales, traffic, refunds and ratings against platform rules. If product information is inaccurate or inventory and shipping data are out of sync, the agent's recommendations and actions will be off as well.
Third, keep a place where humans still look, even after automating. The part-time seller in the coverage still compares the numbers with the previous day herself every night. Even when an AI posts videos, holds back returns and messages influencers, the job of reading the results and adjusting course stays with people.
Conclusion
Kuaishou's AI digital staff are less a new technology than Kuaishou joining the shift China's major e-commerce platforms are making together, handing seller operations to agents, with its own emphasis on video and livestreaming.
The next thing to watch is what numbers Kuaishou reports after Double 11. When it shows how many merchants use the digital staff and whether they keep using them, rather than hand-picked success stories, it will become clear whether these agents have really taken the place of staff.
