# China’s 618 festival is all-in on AI. Its shoppers are not. > Source: > Published: 2026-06-18 10:02:44+00:00 China’s ‘618’ shopping festival, the mid-year sales event named for 18 June and now stretched across several weeks, has become two things at once this year: a showcase for how thoroughly AI has been threaded through online retail, and a reminder of how cautious the Chinese consumer still is. The technology is everywhere. The demand it is meant to unlock is more reluctant. The AI story is the one the platforms want told. Major e-commerce companies have embedded AI across the supply chain, from logistics and pricing to customer service, with 2026 widely described in industry coverage as a breakthrough year for the technology in online retail. Alibaba has been the most visible, connecting its Qwen large language model to Taobao so that shoppers can search, compare, and buy by chatting with an assistant that also handles virtual try-ons and price tracking. That integration is not a pilot. Alibaba [wired Qwen into Taobao’s catalogue](https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-integrates-qwen-ai-with-taobao) of more than four billion products, in what has been called the largest agentic-commerce launch yet from a Chinese platform. Qwen reached around 300 million monthly active users earlier in the year, and China is, by most accounts, further down this road than anywhere in the West. The consumer response is where the picture gets more complicated. Shoppers have taken readily to AI for the unglamorous tasks: comparing prices, hunting coupons, optimising a basket. Acceptance drops sharply when the AI moves from assisting to deciding. Enthusiasm for AI making direct purchase recommendations, or placing orders automatically, runs far lower, according to industry survey data, a gap that suggests people want a faster shop, not a delegated one. Underneath the AI gloss sits the demand problem the festival has struggled to shake. Consumer trust in platforms has been declining, with rising demands for product authenticity and after-sales guarantees, and recurring disputes over counterfeit and “fake imported” goods have driven complaints and pushed the industry back towards value-based competition. The festival, in other words, is leaning on AI partly because the old engine of relentless discounting has lost some of its pull. China is not alone in betting that agents reshape buying. The same logic is being pursued elsewhere, with [Chinese tech giants deploying shopping agents at scale](https://thenextweb.com/news/chinas-tech-giants-are-replacing-the-search-bar-with-ai-agents-that-shop-for-you) while Western players experiment with their own versions. What 618 offers is an early, large-scale read on whether shoppers actually want this. So far the answer is partial: yes to the tools that save time, a firm maybe to the ones that take over. The platforms’ AI ambitions are not confined to the chatbot at the front of the shop. The competition has moved deeper, into the parts of buying that customers never see: [agentic checkout, payments, and order handling](https://thenextweb.com/news/google-universal-cart-agent-payments-shopping-io-2026) that let an assistant carry a purchase from intent to completion. That is where the real prize sits, and also where consumer wariness is sharpest, because handing an agent the ability to pay is a larger leap of trust than asking it to compare two prices. The unevenness in adoption maps onto a deeper question the festival keeps surfacing: whether AI is solving a demand problem or simply decorating one. Discounting fatigue, falling trust, and a guarded consumer are structural features of Chinese e-commerce that no assistant resolves on its own. The technology can make the existing demand easier to convert. Whether it can create demand that was not there is the thing 618’s figures will start, but not finish, answering. The festival runs its course over the coming weeks, and the platforms will report their own figures when it closes. Those numbers will say how much the AI push moved the needle on spending. For now, 618 reads as a market deploying the most advanced retail technology it has ever had against a consumer who remains, for reasons that predate any chatbot, hard to convince. ## Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.