On July 27, Meituan announced the official launch of its full-scene AI Agent platform, CatPaw. The platform provides an out-of-the-box AI workstation along with enterprise-level Agent development and hosting capabilities, targeting local life service merchants.
CatPaw is not an entirely new product. According to publicly available information, it first debuted internally at Meituan in 2023 as an editor plugin. After nearly three years of iteration, it has now been upgraded and released for public testing. Currently, the internal adoption rate among Meituan's R&D team exceeds 95%, and the AI-generated rate for incremental code surpasses 50%.
Data disclosed by Meituan shows that CatPaw has already covered 90,000 employees internally and facilitated the creation of over 30,000 Agents. These Agents have been validated across multiple real business scenarios, including dining, beauty services, and pet hospitals.
In terms of functionality, CatPaw is positioned as an auxiliary tool for merchants' daily operations. After completing authorization and rule configuration, the AI assistant built by the merchant can automatically aggregate scattered information such as sales, group-buying redemption, reviews, and inventory, identify anomalies and pending items in operations, and generate reports. The platform comes with built-in features like store review analysis, product copywriting, marketing posters, and operational reports, leveraging Meituan's extensive data accumulation in the local life service sector.
On the interaction front, CatPaw supports collaboration across mobile, PC, and cloud platforms. The mobile terminal allows users to initiate tasks and check progress at any time, while the PC version offers capabilities such as file operations, browser control, and terminal commands. The cloud supports 7x24-hour operation. When encountering complex tasks, the system can dynamically break down the task and dispatch multiple Agents for concurrent processing.
It is noteworthy that CatPaw explicitly does not make final business decisions. Key operations such as price adjustments and promotional launches still require confirmation from the business owner. The AI is responsible for information organization, problem presentation, and strategic recommendations.
For enterprises with customization needs, CatPaw provides capabilities for the development, deployment, and runtime management of Agents. Companies can configure their own prompts, knowledge bases, credentials, tools, and permissions, and integrate the AI assistant into platforms like Feishu and WeCom. The platform also supports runtime environment isolation, credential management, session records, and private deployment.
The launch of CatPaw marks a B-end implementation of Meituan's AI strategy. In the first quarter of this year, Meituan's R&D investment increased by 22% year-on-year to 7 billion yuan, accounting for 7.7% of total revenue. CEO Wang Xing stated during the earnings call that Meituan views AI as a strategic opportunity to solidify its moat and create new value, and will continue to iterate on AI Agent and large model capabilities.
In early July, Meituan open-sourced its trillion-parameter large model, LongCat-2.0, which is the industry's first trillion-parameter large model to complete the entire training and inference process relying solely on domestic computing power.
Looking at CatPaw's evolution path, from an internal editor plugin to a full-scene AI Agent platform, and from R&D scenarios to merchant operational scenarios, Meituan is attempting to extend its AI capabilities from its strong technical links to the front end of the business. However, a practical challenge is the vast number of local life service merchants with varying levels of digitalization. Whether CatPaw can truly lower the barrier to entry and be consistently used in real operational scenarios remains to be seen over time. Currently, the product is fully open for trial use.