At the 2026 (25th) China Internet Conference held from July 8th to 10th at the Beijing National Convention Center, the focus was on leveraging digital and intelligent collaboration to shape the new development chapter of the "16th Five-Year Plan" period. Jia Jia, Senior Vice President of Taobao Flash Sales and head of the Supercomputing team, delivered a speech at the event.

He highlighted that the fundamental distinction of on-demand retail lies in merging the need for instant fulfillment with localized supply. To address the complex and often latent demands of consumers, Taobao Flash Sales, through deep integration with Tongyi Qianwen, launched an intelligent agent for on-demand retail. During the Spring Festival period, this initiative facilitated over 100 million AI-assisted orders in a single week, shifting the consumer experience from simple product searches to handling complex shopping tasks.

Jia Jia analyzed that empowering on-demand retail with AI requires overcoming two major technical hurdles. The first is the comprehension and task decomposition of complex queries. Consumer demands often involve multiple constraints such as usage scenarios, budget, and delivery timelines, and may even include non-product search tasks like address changes. This necessitates a system capable of contextual and memory-based combinatorial analysis. The second challenge is spatio-temporally aware search and recommendation. Unlike traditional e-commerce recommendations based on personal preferences, on-demand retail recommendations must dynamically integrate factors like local inventory availability and real-time delivery estimates, resulting in significantly higher complexity.

To tackle these challenges, he explained that Taobao Flash Sales has developed an Agent system powered by a "Dual Foundation Model" framework. This "Dual Foundation Model" system serves not only the consumer-facing Agent but also comprehensively empowers the merchant side.

In summary, Jia Jia stated that for Taobao Flash Sales, AI is not merely an efficiency tool but a vehicle for making digital services more natural and accessible. Looking ahead, Taobao Flash Sales will continue to explore the deep integration of AI with on-demand retail, aiming to deliver more native AI experiences for consumers, merchants, and delivery personnel.