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If you scroll through Chinese e-commerce platforms late at night, you will witness a strange phenomenon: thousands of hyper-realistic artificial intelligence avatars flawlessly pitching electronics, clothing, and cosmetics to invisible audiences. They do not sleep, they do not request coffee breaks, and they never cause a celebrity public relations scandal. By 2026, China’s digital human sector has evolved from a novelty metaverse concept into a massive operational infrastructure. But scaling these virtual beings across an entire enterprise requires a specific kind of organizational layout. A prime case study of this is Haier Group (海尔集团), a global multi-industry giant that has successfully operationalized virtual avatars. Haier’s approach reveals a brilliant reality: to deploy cutting-edge, humanless tech effectively, your corporate structure must be built to handle it.
The secret to Haier’s success lies in its choice not to create a single, monolithic artificial intelligence department that pushes standard avatars to every corner of the company. Instead, the conglomerate leverages a decentralized structure composed of independent subsidiaries. Each division treats digital humans not as a uniform marketing tool, but as a custom solution tailored to distinct operational goals. This architecture is spearheaded by Haier Smart Home, the flagship consumer-facing wing where efficiency is king. To tackle the immense labor costs of running continuous livestreams, Haier Smart Home launched a centralized live-streaming hub in Wuhan where unattended studios run round-the-clock. These AI twins pitch home appliances during late-night hours when human hosts are costly and scarce. There is a frequent translation error in automated online trackers that mistakenly pairs Haier Smart Home with the Chinese characters for Heilan Home, a completely unrelated apparel brand, but the true driving force remains Haier Smart Home.
Moving completely past retail marketing, Haier’s financial arm uses digital humans as a practical user interface. Haier Consumer Finance has patented full-process, intelligent interactive credit systems where customers are guided through identity verification, risk assessments, and loan applications by an interactive 3D avatar. This approach humanizes automated banking instead of forcing users to navigate a sterile mobile menu. Meanwhile, Haier Biotech, which focuses on biomedical and laboratory equipment, utilizes digital beings for deep-tech brand storytelling. They deploy virtual ambassadors at massive tech expos and metaverse ceremonies, using the avatars as a visual signal of the company's forward-looking clinical research.
Behind this multi-layered corporate adoption is an underlying business-to-business tech ecosystem. Conglomerates like Haier are master orchestrators, but they rarely build their underlying animation engines from scratch. This introduces a crucial layer of cooperation with specialized tech suppliers like Jimu Yida. Jimu Yida functions as the industrial assembly line for the virtual world, providing the high-precision 3D scanning hardware, automated modeling software, and AI algorithms that major entities require. By partnering with external tech engines that serve an array of clients, from state broadcasters like CCTV to tech titans like Huawei, Haier integrates highly refined, pre-tested virtual assets directly into its specialized sub-brands. This structure prevents Haier from getting bogged down in basic research and development, allowing them to focus entirely on commercial implementation.
When tracking this corporate architecture over a broader timeline, a clear shift from marketing novelty to heavily regulated infrastructure becomes obvious. In 2022, corporate involvement with digital humans was purely experimental, with companies participating in exhibition ceremonies just to prove they could. Fast forward to 2026, and the landscape has completely shifted into a hard-nosed numbers game. Utilizing AI twins in China's massive live commerce industry cuts operational streaming costs by roughly 80 percent, but it has also transformed the regulatory landscape. Massive commercial deployment has triggered strict compliance frameworks, with agencies like the Cyberspace Administration of China requiring all digital humans to be explicitly labeled to avoid deepfake deception. Because Haier's decentralized structure separates its consumer retail risk from its financial risk, the company can adapt to these fast-moving compliance laws division by division, without stalling the entire corporate apparatus. Ultimately, Haier's integration of digital humans proves that the future of enterprise AI isn't centralized—it’s specialized.