On March 14th, the highly anticipated Appliance & Electronics World Expo (AWE) took place in Shanghai, showcasing the latest in home appliances and consumer electronics. The spotlight was on the application of technologies like artificial intelligence in these fields, with numerous smart home innovations and related solutions making their debut.
AWE serves as the prime stage for launching new appliances every year. As a leading omni-channel platform in the home appliance industry, JD.com not only presented a variety of new home appliance products at AWE but also arranged for JD Cloud's digital assistant, "Yanxi," to serve as an on-site guide and recommender, offering detailed introductions to JD's various services and home appliance innovations. Simultaneously, online, "Yanxi" continued the relay with JD's procurement team, appearing in JD's live streaming rooms for home appliances and furnishings, providing consumers with round-the-clock access to explore new products and make purchases.
AWE: Where Exhibition Meets Sales
Just before AWE 2024, the home appliance and consumer electronics industry received a significant boost from favorable policies. The Fourth Meeting of the Central Finance and Economic Committee explicitly encouraged the trade-in of traditional consumer goods, including home appliances, to promote large-scale recycling and reuse. The 2024 Government Work Report also highlighted encouraging and promoting the trade-in of consumer goods as a key focus for the year.
To implement this trade-in policy, AWE organized a live streaming night and various consumer promotion activities. JD's exhibition area, in collaboration with brands such as Haier, Samsung, Midea, Linuo, and Hisense, will host new product launch ceremonies on March 14-15, with these new products simultaneously debuting in JD's live streaming rooms for home appliances and furnishings. JD's digital assistant, "Yanxi," along with JD's procurement team, will relay for 24 hours, bringing numerous discounts and benefits for these new products.
According to JD's exhibition staff, consumers are paying more attention to details such as parameters, functions, and promotional activities when purchasing smart home appliances, and the nighttime traffic in the live streaming rooms remains high as consumer habits evolve. Digital assistants can provide round-the-clock online service, interact deeply with users, accurately answer questions about home appliance products, after-sales service, and increase fan stickiness, thereby boosting sales conversion during off-peak hours.
According to the JD booth's "Digital Human Guide", the Yanshi Digital Human is based on JD's years of knowledge accumulation in retail, especially in the household appliances and electronics (3C) sectors. The Yanshi Digital Human has been extensively deployed in retail scenarios, with over 100 domestic brands and over 4,000 brands' live streaming rooms, including TCL, Haier, Lenovo, and other household appliance and digital brands. It has helped brands increase conversion rates by 30% during idle periods, bringing in over 1 billion GMV. Solutions such as smart customer service from Jing Xiao Zhi and Yanshi's smart outbound calling were also showcased simultaneously at the AWE venue.
In the current landscape of home appliance marketing, competition has entered a new phase. It's no longer just about the length of live streaming sessions but also about the level of professionalism and the ability of live streaming teams to operate in a lean, systematic, and collaborative manner. As a representative from a home appliance company put it, "The hosts of live streaming sales are working very hard, promoting products from morning till night, around the clock." However, no matter how live streaming sales evolve, professional hosts, comprehensive live streaming operations, and sufficient duration remain the entry barriers.
Generative AI becomes a "must-have" for the home appliance industry
Ms. Li, an attendee preparing for a "trade-in for new" program, mentioned, "I've been using smart home appliances for a long time, but they're all operated through various apps. This time, I want to see if there's anything more convenient."
Due to issues such as human-machine interaction and inter-device communication, the penetration rate of smart homes is not very high at present. According to an IDC report, global shipments of smart home devices experienced a decline for the first time in 2022. In 2024, with the rapid development of generative AI, whether it can bring about a "new spring" for smart homes is drawing attention.
"AI + home appliances" has become an irreversible trend, and this is also the main selling point for most new products at this year's AWE. As hardware configurations become more uniform, only by focusing on user experience can buyers feel that they are getting value for their money. Many manufacturers believe that with the support of generative AI, the interaction methods of smart home devices will move beyond preset programs. They will evolve from simple command responses to an artificial intelligence stage centered around a central system—learning users' daily habits, interpreting their needs, and providing services.
At the AWE venue, attendees were the first to experience future home experiences, such as interconnected people, vehicles, and homes, and smart kitchens with full-process voice guidance for quick setup.
Generative AI is not only a "must-have" for new products but also a "must-have" for home appliance brand operations.
JD Cloud's Yaxi, with over 10 years of industrial practice in intelligent dialogue and multimodal interaction technology, has significantly enhanced the capabilities of intelligent customer service in content generation and accuracy through generative AI. Moreover, it can further improve the quality of response content by better understanding user intent, making it more akin to human performance. For instance, when a user inquires about "phones that can use subway cards," intelligent customer service would match phones with NFC functionality and further inquire about attributes such as price range to precisely recommend products.
"It's not just about delivering robotic responses; it's about providing an emotional connection with warmth," said the relevant person in charge. He also explained that by setting seed data for emotional dimensions and matching them in the long-term accumulated dialogue database of JD Customer Service, Yaxi can now accurately identify seven typical emotions (such as anger, urgency, happiness, etc.). Through continuous self-learning and iteration, it further supports home appliance brands in improving user experience and achieving efficient conversion in pre-sales, mid-sales, and after-sales stages through intelligent customer service Jing Xiaozhi. Jiuyang utilizes Jing Xiaozhi to automate services in multiple high-frequency scenarios, achieving a 99.42% response rate within 30 seconds for consumer inquiries, with a machine-only response rate of over 50%, and a human transfer rate of only 34.56%.
Looking at the home appliance industry from the perspective of the Appliance & Electronics World Expo (AWE), it is evident that mainstream home appliance companies are actively leveraging AI technology to optimize various aspects including manufacturing, sales, research and development, supply chain, and after-sales service, becoming a new driving force for enterprise digital transformation.
