2026 China Internet Conference opened, and Jia Jie, Senior Vice President of Taobao Flash Sales and Head of the Supercomputing Team, delivered a keynote speech, pointing out a major pain point in the e-commerce and instant retail industry. He noted that the vast majority of e-commerce and instant retail apps still lack native AI interaction capabilities, and users can only use short product keywords for search. Complex and scenario-based consumer needs cannot be fully expressed, and real consumer demands are severely suppressed.
Jia Jie first clarified the essential differences between instant retail and traditional retail, summarizing its core three elements as instant demand, instant fulfillment, and localized supply. Consumer demand has strong time sensitivity, such as instant meal ordering, buying vegetables and ingredients, and emergency medicine purchases, with most people expecting delivery within half an hour to one hour. The product supply is concentrated within 3 to 5 kilometers around users, focusing on nearby delivery, significantly improving overall convenience.
The "bottleneck" of the search box in a trillion-dollar market
Data shows that the instant retail industry is in a period of rapid growth: the market size reached 780 billion yuan in 2024 and exceeded 1 trillion yuan in 2025. The Ministry of Commerce predicts that by 2030, it will surpass 2 trillion yuan. However, as the scale continues to expand, the shortcomings of the traditional interaction model have become increasingly prominent. What users want goes far beyond "a bottle of soy sauce" or "a bag of rice," but when the search box only accepts keywords, complex real-life needs like "Tonight my friends are coming over for hot pot, help me prepare all the ingredients, with a budget of 200 yuan, where someone doesn't eat spicy food" cannot be expressed at all.
In Jia Jie's view, this experience gap of "wanting to say but not being able to express" is precisely the next breakthrough for the instant retail industry. AI should not just be a Q&A robot embedded in the app, but rather a service carrier capable of fully understanding complex scenario-based needs and automatically completing orders.
Partnering with Qwen to launch an intelligent agent, AI orders exceeded 100 million in a week
Taobao Flash Sales has already taken the lead. During this year's Spring Festival, Taobao Flash Sales partnered with Tongyi Qianwen to launch a dedicated intelligent agent for instant retail, supporting natural language dialogue for placing orders. Within just one week of its launch, AI orders exceeded 100 million. From the order data, we can see that user demand has changed significantly. Users are no longer limited to simple product keywords but have generated a large number of complex demands with constraints.
