China leads the agentic commerce race as Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com deploy AI shopping agents at scale
China’s tech giants are replacing the traditional e-commerce search bar with AI agents that can find, compare, and purchase products through natural conversation. Alibaba’s Qwen assistant, now integrated with Taobao’s four-billion-item catalogue, has reached 300 million monthly active users, while Alipay processed 120 million AI-agent transactions in a single week in February. Meituan, JD.com, ByteDance, and Tencent are all racing to deploy similar capabilities.