Alibaba enlists ‘Lipstick King’ Li Jiaqi to sell AI tokens via livestream

What happened On the evening of November 2, Chen Yusen (陈宇森), vice president of Alibaba Group and CEO of QwenWork (千问办公), joined top livestreamer Li Jiaqi (李佳琦) on his Tmall Double 11 stream to sell monthly subscriptions to the AI productivity platform. QwenWork, Alibaba's AI productivity platform, lets users produce documents and PowerPoint presentations or analyze data by typing instructions in plain language. During the livestream, Li and Chen showed how it could be used in everyday life. Parents could have it sort their children’s homework and test papers and build targeted practice games. Livestream operators could feed it stream replays and viewer comments to produce business analysis reports, and Chen also walked viewers through preparing workplace performance reviews. Li asked Chen whether he could build him an AI avatar (AI分身) to chat around the clock with “the girls,” as Li habitually addresses his audience. “AI can't replace Li Jiaqi,” Chen replied, according to Jiemian. “I’d rather help fans use AI to take care of the small stuff — getting off work on time, spending time with their cats and dogs, looking after their families.” Li added that his own livestream business already uses AI and big data to generate shopping rankings in real time. Normally priced at 28 RMB ($4.20), the basic monthly subscription was discounted to 0.01 RMB (less than $0.01) for new users that evening. Despite a limit of one per user ID, nearly 100,000 were sold in the first 30 minutes, Beijing Business Daily reported. According to QwenWork’s own sales data, cited by The Paper, those subscriptions carried a combined allowance of about 2 trillion tokens. The livestream drew more than 10 million views. How are Tmall and JD.com turning AI tokens into a standalone retail category for Double 11? Tokens have become a retail category of their own for this year’s Double 11 (双十一), also known as Singles' Day, China’s biggest annual shopping festival. Tmall made tokens a standalone promotional category for the first time and opened an “AI Space Station” token recharge center on September 3, with AI developers including Zhipu, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and StepFun selling there alongside Alibaba Cloud and QwenWork, according to Jiemian. Rival JD.com opened an “AI Software Recharge Hall” in September. For Li, the night marked the first time he had sold AI computing products on his channel. The Jing Take: Why did Alibaba use Li Jiaqi’s livestream shopping channel to explain AI tokens? A token (词元) is the basic unit of data an AI model processes and a standard measure of AI usage, yet few consumers know the term. QwenWork relied on Li’s skill at explaining and demonstrating products to make the idea concrete, using tasks such as building PowerPoint presentations and helping children with schoolwork. AI is more often discussed at tech launches; on Li’s stream, it was demonstrated and sold like any other consumer product. More revealing than the sales tally was the acquisition strategy behind it. At 0.01 RMB each, nearly 100,000 subscriptions brought in less than 1,000 RMB ($150). QwenWork was more likely using Li’s audience to sign up new users at almost no upfront cost. Zhang Yi (张毅), CEO and chief analyst at iiMedia Research, made a similar point to Beijing Business Daily, saying the intent behind the event may matter more than how many tokens were sold and describing it as an exercise in consumer education for the token economy. A low price can win a first purchase without building a habit. With many AI chatbots in China free to use, the real test is whether these users keep using QwenWork after the promotion ends, and whether they will pay full price. Those answers will decide whether the campaign pays off. Will Chinese consumers pay full price for AI subscriptions once livestream discounts end? Industry data sharpens the question of who will pay. Normalized API prices for new model versions released by five major Chinese developers in 2026 averaged 13.46 RMB ($2.02) per million tokens, up 98% from 6.8 RMB ($1.02) in the second half of 2025, according to an October 23 report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Usage is rising too: daily token consumption in China reached about 500 trillion in June, nearly four times the December 2025 level. Livestream shopping in China has moved well beyond lipstick and skincare, and AI companies are borrowing the consumer-brand playbook of influencer reach and steep discounts to follow. Unlike a lipstick, though, an AI service usually proves its worth only through repeated use, so a livestream sale is a starting point. The harder job is turning a 0.01 RMB bargain into regular use and, eventually, a base of paying subscribers. With tokens now sold the way lipsticks are, tech companies are competing for a place in consumers’ daily routines as much as on technical benchmarks. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

Alibaba enlists ‘Lipstick King’ Li Jiaqi to sell AI tokens via livestream

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Alibaba enlists ‘Lipstick King’ Li Jiaqi to sell AI tokens via livestream

TUMI’s new growth playbook: From travel expertise to lifestyle performance