Why did Alibaba Cloud's virtual digital human exit the stage on the eve of Double 11?
It is the annual "Double 11" shopping festival again, and "digital humans" have started working on the screen on schedule.
In the bustling live-streaming rooms, they are no longer just a gimmick. From beauty and daily chemical products to digital home appliances, digital human on-duty figures can be seen in almost every category. 7×24-hour non-stop live streaming has become a basic operation configuration for many stores.
During the 618 shopping promotion in 2026, the average daily GMV of Taobao's digital human live streaming exceeded 100 million yuan; on JD.com, the number of merchants using digital humans to start live broadcasts achieved an explosive 5-fold growth.
However, on the eve of this year's "Double 11" promotion, an announcement from Alibaba Cloud that it would delist all virtual digital human products seems to have poured a basin of cold water on the continuously heating track.
This is not the first time Alibaba has scaled down its digital human related business: in August 2025, the Tongyi Xingchen digital human was officially taken offline, and a year later, the entire virtual digital human product line was terminated.
With continuous contraction for more than a year, Alibaba Cloud has always had a clear direction, gradually withdrawing from the virtual digital human product market.
From investing heavily in technology nine years ago and fully rolling out application scenarios to actively cutting off the entire mature product line now, behind Alibaba Cloud's strategic shift, the underlying logic of the entire digital human track is changing: the technical threshold is gradually lowering, the dividend period of general standardized products has come to an end, and the industry is moving from the first half of conceptual expansion to the second half of commercial value differentiation.
01
The threshold for digital humans disappears, and major tech giants start to "offload burdens"
From starting exploration in 2017 to product launch and full rollout of scenarios, Alibaba Cloud has been laying out the digital human track for nine years.
This full-link digital human product built by Tongyi Lab was launched in the form of a virtual digital human open platform in 2022, with core functions such as 2D and 3D digital humans, video synthesis, and 3D digital human streaming media launched successively; in August 2023, a lightweight SaaS-level video synthesis application was added, and the service mode covered both PaaS interfaces and SaaS consoles.
The application scenarios have also continued to expand over the past few years, from news broadcasting, education and training, marketing video generation, to customer service assistants, virtual live streaming, and then to 7×24-hour intelligent Q&A and business guidance in the finance, government affairs, and cultural tourism industries, covering almost all mainstream application scenarios of digital humans at that time.
However, this full delisting is not an unexpected decision, and the signal of contraction appeared a year earlier.
In August 2025, the Tongyi Xingchen digital human of the same system was officially taken offline, and the official gave alternative solutions for migration to Lingjing Digital Human and FaceUnity Digital Human. In the announcement in October 2026, Alibaba Cloud chose to directly terminate the entire virtual digital human product line, covering all related businesses such as digital human image customization, platform points and membership subscriptions, and digital human live streaming products.
Alibaba Cloud publicly defines it as a normal delisting for strategic adjustment and product iteration. Some industry practitioners analyze that this essentially means that major tech giants have actively withdrawn from the price war of general-purpose, mid-to-low-end digital human SaaS.
The shift of business focus happened earlier than the public product offline time.
In September 2025, Alibaba Cloud cooperated with Bangyan Technology to promote the NuwaAI intelligent agent digital human platform. Alibaba Cloud output computing power, Tongyi large model and Bailian development platform, and the final digital human product was handed over to Bangyan for production.
Jiang Lingling, President of the Intelligent Agent Digital Human Product Line of Bangyan Technology, mentioned at that time that the future competition is not about who masters more advanced technology, but about who can transform technology into more easy-to-use productivity tools.
In February 2026, Alibaba Cloud also cooperated with Parallel Universe Technology to build the Huiyu AI digital human live streaming room system, which also provided Wuying cloud computers and elastic computing power.
The paths of the two cooperations are highly consistent: Alibaba Cloud has moved to the background, no longer directly facing end customers to make digital human products, and has instead become the underlying capability supporter of digital human business.
Behind this role transformation is Alibaba Cloud's strategic choice.
First, it is the tilt of strategic resources. At the 2026 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming clarified the core resource investment direction of the group: AI models, AI chips, and AI cloud are the three cornerstones of the machine intelligence era, and resources will continue to be concentrated in these three areas.
An industry practitioner told Tech Planet that digital humans belong to application-layer businesses with heavy delivery and heavy operation and maintenance, with high investment and high standardization difficulty, and their input-output efficiency is not at the same level as that of computing power and large models.
Second, there is pressure from the market. The homogeneity of general-purpose digital humans is becoming increasingly serious, and the differentiation space is constantly narrowing; after large models greatly reduce the cost of content generation, it is difficult for enterprises to build long-term competitive barriers.
What's more, Alibaba does not lack the digital human landing capability internally. Taobao & Tmall, relying on e-commerce business scenarios to build vertical digital humans, does not need Alibaba Cloud to separately support a general-purpose product line.
When the threshold disappears, general-purpose products become a burden. Focusing on underlying capabilities is the choice Alibaba Cloud has made at present.
02
The dividend of general products ends, and digital humans enter the second half of development
Looking back at the entire industry from Alibaba's perspective, the digital human track has not actually cooled down, but is still expanding. However, as the technical threshold disappears and supervision tightens, the survival logic of players is changing.
The "2026-2027 China Virtual Digital Human Industry Development and Consumer Behavior Insight Report" released by iiMedia Research shows that the core market size of China's virtual digital humans reached 480.6 billion yuan in 2025, and is expected to reach 935.6 billion yuan in 2030.
The industry has moved from the concept verification stage to the large-scale commercial landing period, and application scenarios are penetrating from entertainment marketing to vertical industries such as finance, government affairs, e-commerce, and education.
According to the data in the same report, in 2026, 19.71% of enterprises in the e-commerce industry applied AI digital humans, 13.44% in health, social security and social welfare industry, 11.78% in finance, 10.24% in education, and 9.69% in both media and transportation industries.
It is more intuitive when it comes to transactions. During the 618 promotion in 2026, the total GMV of digital human live streaming on five platforms including Taobao, Douyin, JD.com, Pinduoduo and Kuaishou exceeded 45.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 186%; more than 300,000 merchants have incorporated digital humans into their daily live broadcasts, and the digital human live broadcast rate of top stores exceeds 70%.
Lingxi Deep Intelligence also revealed to Tech Planet that its customer volume has increased by more than 20% in the past year. Digital humans have gradually changed from a marketing gimmick a few years ago to a basic configuration for merchants.
The direct reason for this popularity is that the price has been completely driven down.
The SaaS-based subscription has dropped to the thousand-yuan level. According to the pricing of Taobao's official digital human, the advanced version is 499 yuan per month, and the flagship version is 1299 yuan.
A merchant told Tech Planet that if it is just a small brand that has just started to do live streaming, the cost of a real human anchor and operation team is at least 60% higher than the comprehensive operation cost of digital humans.
From millions of yuan for a single customization in the early years to a few hundred yuan for monthly subscription now, the technical threshold of digital humans has completely disappeared, and the premium space of standardized products has also disappeared.
Along with the price drop, the comprehensive tightening of supervision has arrived.
On July 15, 2026, the "Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interactive Services" was officially implemented. Douyin, Kuaishou, WeChat Channels, Bilibili and other platforms simultaneously tightened review, and unattended live streaming rooms supported by looped pre-recorded broadcasts were centrally cleaned up.
Law enforcement has been implemented in specific cases. Recently, Changping District of Beijing investigated and punished a case of using AI virtual human live streaming to promote ordinary food with health functions (such as "improving immunity"), and imposed a fine of 5,000 yuan.
The rise of compliance threshold has directly cut off the low-cost mass unattended live streaming operation, which was previously the largest shipment scenario for general-purpose digital humans.
Merchants' mentality has thus begun to return to rationality.
The above-mentioned merchant said that people should not blindly believe the story of "digital humans replacing real humans". More people position it as a supplementary tool, using digital humans to undertake off-peak traffic at night.
For standardized categories such as beauty, daily chemicals, and digital products, using digital humans to broadcast for a long time and explain stably may improve operational efficiency. However, for categories that rely heavily on trust such as jewelry and luxury goods, the core live streaming scenarios still need to rely on real human anchors.
03
Customizing "a face" is no longer profitable, and the digital human industry is looking for new coordinates
From the announcement release to the full service shutdown in November 2027, Alibaba Cloud has reserved a buffer window of more than one year for existing customers, but the cost pressure of migration still exists.
According to Alibaba Cloud's official suggestions, users can migrate to cloud market solutions such as Ant Lingjing Digital Human, FaceUnity Digital Human, and Yizhi Intelligent AI Live Streaming Digital Human.
However, these are all independent third-party products, which means that users not only need to re-purchase and calculate costs, but also need to move all customized digital human images, script configurations, business interfaces, and data connections, and go through a series of links such as development transformation, joint debugging testing, and platform compliance review, which is time-consuming and laborious.
A practitioner in the digital human industry introduced to Tech Planet that customers of different sizes are impacted differently. Most small and medium-sized merchants use standardized templates, so the migration cost is low. But for large customers, digital humans are often deeply embedded in the business system, and the replacement cost is relatively high.
Alibaba Cloud's exit is a clear industry dividing line, announcing that the extensive era of digital humans "making money by customizing faces" has officially ended. The market is still growing, and demand is still expanding, but the dividend of standardized products has peaked, and players need to find new value anchors along different paths.
One type of players moves upstream and becomes part of the infrastructure of the digital human industry.
Following a path similar to that chosen by Alibaba Cloud, they no longer directly face end customers to make digital human products, but instead output computing power, large model capabilities, rendering engines and development tools to earn money from underlying capabilities.
Another type of players sinks into scenarios and become "solution service providers" for vertical industries.
It is not just selling standardized digital human images, but embedding digital humans into the complete business process. For example, providing e-commerce merchants with a full-link AI live streaming solution including central control, field control, and data review, providing banks with digital human customer managers that can connect to business systems, and providing government service halls with virtual service staff that can handle actual businesses.
This is also the common choice of most major tech giants at present: JD JoyAvatar and Taobao & Tmall Digital Human are deeply derived based on their own e-commerce scenarios; Tencent cuts into the content creation and enterprise service track through "Tencent Zhiying" and "Tencent Cloud Intelligent Digital Human". Baidu focuses on empowering digital humans with large models, and deeply cultivates vertical tracks with heavy interaction such as finance and government affairs.
The core competitiveness of such players is no longer technology, but the understanding of the industry.
In the final analysis, this round of reshuffling in the digital human track essentially returns to the starting point of commercial value.
The development of AI has made making a realistic face no longer a threshold, and the real competition of digital humans has just begun. Its ultimate value lies in the extent to which it can integrate into the real industrial process and create quantifiable efficiency value.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Tech Planet" (ID: tech618), written by Ren Xueyun, published with authorization from 36Kr.