China's best-known lipstick salesman has found a new product to pitch: an invisible digital fuel that powers artificial intelligence.
Li Jiaqi, a livestream shopping superstar known as the "lipstick king", sold about 100,000 monthly subscriptions to Alibaba Group's QwenWork AI office service in just 30 minutes on Monday, representing roughly 2 trillion tokens in usage allowances.
The eye-catching sales performance offers a glimpse into a new frontier for China's annual Singles' Day shopping festival, where AI services are beginning to compete for consumers' attention alongside cosmetics, clothing and household appliances.
The subscriptions, normally priced at 28 yuan ($4.20) a month, were offered for just 0.01 yuan during the livestreaming session, helping fuel a buying frenzy among viewers eager to stock up on something they could neither see nor touch.
Tokens are the basic units of information processed by AI models, serving as a measure of how much computing work they perform. Once largely confined to the vocabulary of software developers, they are increasingly being packaged into subscriptions that ordinary shoppers can purchase.
During the livestreaming session, Chen Yusen, CEO of Alibaba's QwenWork unit, demonstrated how AI could help users prepare financial reports, organize children's homework and build interactive applications.
Li, who made his name selling thousands of lipstick tubes in minutes, even asked whether AI could create a digital version of himself to chat with his fans around the clock.
Chen replied that AI could not replace Li, but could help people handle everyday chores and free up more time for their families.
Alibaba's Tmall launched an AI token purchasing platform in September, bringing together services from major Chinese AI developers including DeepSeek, Z.ai, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.
The platform reported a 450 percent increase in token-category transaction value on Oct 20, the opening day of this year's Singles' Day sales. JD also introduced an AI token marketplace as tech firms compete to capture a share of the emerging market.
Zhang Yi, chief analyst of iiMedia Research, said that the significance of Li's livestreaming success may lie less in how many tokens were sold and more in what the event represents.
"The move marked an effort to introduce the token economy to mainstream consumers, transforming what was previously a business-oriented technology concept into something shoppers could understand, purchase and even stockpile," Zhang said.
But the headline-grabbing numbers tell only part of the story. The 2 trillion tokens represented the combined allowances attached to the subscriptions, rather than computing resources actually consumed. At the promotional price of just 0.01 yuan, the sale of 100,000 subscriptions would have generated only about 1,000 yuan in revenue.
Cui Lili, deputy dean of the institute of digital economy at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, said, "The livestream's immediate value is in educating consumers about AI, while its longer-term success will depend on how many buyers actually activate and use their subscriptions."
Cui cautioned that some customers may have been drawn primarily by the bargain price rather than a genuine need for AI services, which still require a degree of technical understanding.
chengyu@chinadaily.com.cn
