Ashley Dudarenok

TL;DR. China’s AI commerce is moving faster than the West’s, and the reason starts underneath the storefront: the AI models are free. Alibaba’s Qwen and the startup DeepSeek release their models open-source, so any platform or brand can build a shopping assistant for the cost of the servers instead of a per-query fee. That drops

TL;DR. China is running the world’s largest test of whether AI can lift consumer spending, with a national “AI Plus” plan and AI wired into payments, delivery, and shopping. The early read: AI is boosting the supply side and the buying experience, but it has not yet revived broad household spending. Here is what works,