Ant Afu, the "catfish", dives into the water and stirs up surges in the health industry.

On September 10, 2026, at the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Summit, Ant Aifu officially released its performance report for over a year: as of now, the cumulative number of App users has reached 150 million, with nearly 20 million daily health consultation sessions. Meanwhile, Ant Aifu announced that it will continue to invest in its health strategy, further expanding from weight management to five key scenarios including exercise, diet, sleep and mental health, and add a new "Health" section on the product homepage.

In the exhibition area, a large number of leading hardware and top brands including Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi, Yuwell and others gathered in the "Aifu's Circle of Friends" zone, where audiences thronged and long queues formed at the experience area; at the health forum site, partners from different fields sat together to discuss how AI can bring new opportunities to the health industry, and the venue was fully packed. Outside the forum, health demo rooms were set up ranging from "future hospitals" to "future homes" and "future village clinics", gradually unfolding a future vision of AI-powered health management.

This scene is exactly a microcosm of the current health industry: large AI models have brought brand new possibilities to health services, and users' "active health" behaviors are gradually taking shape; at the same time, a new opportunity window has opened up for the whole industry.

Behind the scene where Aifu is "surrounded by admirers" lies its track of being a "catfish" that swam into the health industry over the past period. It seized the key window of AI technology iteration, combined Ant's years of accumulation in medical resources and industrial ecology, and built a professional and credible medical-grade AI base, making more inclusive health management services possible. More importantly, it also drives a large number of industry partners to jointly move towards new incremental markets.

01. With 150 million users, Aifu is advancing towards a national-level health AI application

In the exhibition area of the Bund Summit, the "future home" demo room of Aifu realistically restores the dining scene of an ordinary family: various food models are placed scattered on a dining table in the exhibition area. Relying on Aifu's multi-modal image recognition capability, users can point their mobile phones at the dishes when eating, quickly identify the types of dishes, automatically break down core nutritional indicators such as calories, carbohydrates and protein, and complete the diet record for the whole meal.

The easy and convenient experience in the offline exhibition area is a microcosm of how ordinary users carry out health management through Aifu.

Judging only by the volume of user growth, Aifu has already ranked among the top of health AI applications.

The significance of this figure may be more prominent when viewed in the industry coordinate system. Over the past decade, the health management track has been continuously favored, but it has been difficult to achieve both large user scale and deep user engagement. The booming momentum of Aifu in the past year, together with the figures of 150 million users and 20 million daily consultations, not only proves that "health is a daily rigid demand for the public", but also makes the industry see the real potential of this track.

From the perspective of user structure, according to statistics from the Aifu team, 55% of users come from third-tier and lower cities, and elderly users account for about 25%. The fact that a health AI can penetrate into the sinking market and the silver-haired group shows that it meets not only the "trial demand" of a small number of people, but the basic health needs of the majority of people, which is also the essential difference between a "national-level application" and a "viral App".

At the "future village clinic" of the Bund Summit, we also saw a series of objects and photos that truly show how AI assists rural doctors in outputting auxiliary diagnosis and treatment suggestions as well as medication guidance to protect the health of villagers in the clinic of Mianhua Village, Pu'an, Guizhou. This also confirms Aifu's inclusive positioning for the general public.

In addition to user volume, Aifu also announced the completion of product-side updates at this Bund Summit: a new entrance to the health section has been added to the App homepage, which together with the Aifu dialog box and medical treatment section forms three core entrances. In this way, users can not only call various health services through AI dialogue, but also directly click the section to jump to the corresponding functions, with more flexible operation modes.

After entering the health section, users can not only view the data of bound health hardware and more than ten health dynamics such as weight and sleep generated after recording diet, but also call services like "AI Diet Shooting" and "AI Nutrition Suggestions" to obtain practical and referable health status analysis and improvement suggestions.

This change from "inquiring about health" to "managing health" enables AI to evolve from answering questions to connecting services. This is in line with the ongoing evolution of the entire AI application industry. At present, the dialogue capability of AI applications is no longer a scarce resource, and the party that can complete a more complete service closed loop will have differentiated value.

02. A body fat scale verifies the potential of the "smart hardware + AI service" model

At the end of June this year, Aifu's "Scientific Weight Loss of 50 Million Kilograms" campaign went viral across the whole network. Users received smart body fat scales at a subsidized price, bound them to the App, and could obtain customized diet and exercise plans from AI, and record physical changes through online check-ins.

According to statistics, in the two months after the campaign was launched, it attracted more than 2.75 million users to participate, with a total weight loss of 2.5 million kilograms; Tmall data shows that the search popularity of body fat scales brought by this campaign even exceeded that of the "618" shopping festival. In June and July, the transaction volume of domestic weight scales increased by 60% and 100% year-on-year respectively.

The huge success of this campaign, on the one hand, strongly proves that AI has quantifiable value in improving ordinary people's health management behaviors, and on the other hand, enables Aifu to verify the effectiveness of the "smart hardware + AI service" model.

The demand for weight loss has always existed. No matter how the path iterates, weight loss eventually returns to a "counter-human" matter: it requires long-term persistence, and is a comprehensive management involving diet, exercise and sleep...

As a platform that has been launched for only over a year, why can Aifu stimulate the enthusiasm of millions of ordinary people to participate in a short period of time, and even make the traditional body fat scale category popular again?

The productivity revolution brought by AI is the core reason. Professional nutritionist resources are scarce, and the cost of a personalized plan is quite high. However, based on the capability of Ant's medical large model, Aifu enables professional-level health management to benefit more ordinary people. In this dimension, the significance of AI technology is not only to translate professional health knowledge into easy-to-understand content, but more importantly, to realize service scaling: it can output personalized weight loss plans for massive users in real time at a marginal cost close to zero, which is difficult to achieve under the traditional model.

However, technology alone is not enough, and operation design is also critical. Aifu has made the body fat scale the "entry" of the entire weight loss service. Users step on the scale, view physical indicators, get AI data interpretation, generate plans, execute the plans, and step on the scale again... Weight loss is broken down into traceable and executable actions. Each time stepping on the scale is an instant feedback, and each check-in and change becomes a positive incentive. It is no longer a boring self-management, but has become a game with social attributes: users share their progress, supervise each other, and continue to participate like completing daily tasks.

In this process, the connection relationship between users and health hardware products is also being rewritten. In the past, the relationship between hardware and users often ended after "measuring the data". The addition of AI enables hardware data to have a post-link that continuously serves users, makes suggestions more accurate, and users will be more willing to use the products.

Once this virtuous cycle is in operation, the cooperation boundary between Aifu and health industry partners will also be expanded.

Yu Caihao, Deputy General Manager of Yuwell Medical, believes that after the continuous blood glucose data of CGM is connected to Aifu's AI health file, the suggestions given by AI are no longer general health popular science content, but feedback that can really change behaviors, such as "the cup of milk tea you drank today made your blood sugar stay at a high level for four hours".

In the catering field, 73 stores of Laoxiangji in Hangzhou have launched the "AI Diet Shooting" experience, relying on Aifu's multi-modal recognition capability to realize food nutrition identification. During the cooperation period, the number of store visitors and cooperative orders both increased.

In the fitness field, chain brands such as Lekeeper and Zhongtian Fitness have also joined in. Han Wei, Founder and CEO of Lekeeper Sports, believes that AI is expected to become a key variable in health management, and Aifu's campaigns will definitely drive the development of health consumption directly or indirectly. "Users are healthier, and the industry is also developing."

In other words, Aifu does not take health management as a task completed by itself alone, but takes high-frequency public health scenarios such as weight loss as the entry point, relies on AI capabilities to lower the participation threshold for ordinary users, and then connects all industrial forces around the common health goal to expand the "active health" market cake.

03. Weight loss is only a demo scenario, Aifu wants to send an "invitation letter" to the whole industry

If body fat scales can be reactivated by AI, what about sleep monitoring devices, sports watches and continuous blood glucose monitors?

What the operation of the weight loss scenario verifies is not only the achievement of a national weight loss campaign. It is more like a practical sample tested by real users: relying on the AI base, it can indeed link multiple participants to meet the health demands of ordinary people with practical product value.

If this model can be replicated in various segmented fields such as chronic diseases, diet, and maternal and child health to become a comprehensive platform, Aifu will also build a deep moat and move a step further towards a "national-level" application.

Take the sleep scenario that Aifu is about to launch as an example: a survey jointly conducted by institutions including Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Fudan University and published in *The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific* states that the proportion of people aged 15 and above with poor sleep quality (PSQI>5) in China exceeds 23%. "Having a good night's sleep" has become a very urgent practical demand for contemporary people. However, to fully understand the sleep status, a complete set of services including sleep monitoring hardware, sleep-aid content and sleep health guidance is required, and most ordinary people lack convenient means to interpret their own sleep data.

In response to this demand, Aifu has completed the interconnection with Xiaomi Sports Health App. When users view sleep and heart rate data, they can directly call Aifu's capabilities to complete data interpretation and obtain preliminary health reference suggestions.

For upstream and downstream partners in the industrial chain, this means brand new opportunities for value co-creation. By joining Aifu's service system, all parties will have the opportunity to reach hundreds of millions of users, give full play to their own professional capabilities, and jointly create more value for public health.

According to information from the Aifu team, the hardware ecosystem of the App has continued to expand, and now supports the access of smart hardware from 18 major brands including Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi and Yuwell.

Policies are also providing guidance for this kind of exploration. For example, the "15th Five-Year Plan for National Health" issued by the State Council clearly proposes to "promote the public to pay more attention to active health"; the "Healthy China 2030" Planning Outline puts forward the vision of realizing a total scale of 16 trillion yuan in the health service industry by 2030.

Nowadays, AI is being integrated into thousands of industries, and new "super applications" are about to emerge in all walks of life. In the medical and health industry, Aifu, this "catfish", has swum into deeper waters, linked numerous industrial forces, and covered more users and industry opportunities in the new demand scenarios reconstructed by AI.