At the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, most of the over 800 exhibitors showcased how their AI technology is humanlike.

Chinese firm SenseTime displayed an AI avatar with big eyes, long hair and bangs livestreaming on e-commerce platform Taobao, which is a popular way to shop in China.

From time to time, the AI avatar looked off camera just as human influencers tend to do.

SenseTime claims it can clone influencers. Then their AI avatars, fed with a few product links, can generate their own script and answer questions from buyers  in real time.

“A regular live streaming studio requires about four workers to run. Now you might only need one or two people to operate the AI avatar,” the head of SenseTime’s avatar department, Li Bin, said.

China’s move to adopt AI in business comes all the way from the top. The country’s cabinet, the State Council, wrapped up a meeting at the end of July and agreed to “vigorously promote the large-scale commercial application of artificial intelligence” and integrate AI into various industries. Unlike in the U.S., there has not been as much public discourse in China about what happens to the humans replaced by AI.

It comes at a time when urban unemployment is high, especially among young workers, hitting 14.5% for those ages 16 to 24 and 6.7% for 25 to 29-year-olds, both figures excluding students.

Instead, companies at the AI show, and they’re almost all Chinese, emphasized how efficient AI makes workers.

“Our AI avatars can livestream 24 hours a day,” SenseTime’s Li said, adding that the more content influencers generate, the more exposure social media platforms give them. He said AI avatars can help human influencers do more livestreaming shows, rather than replace them.

“The competition is not humans versus AI, it is between humans. Humans are merely using AI to get a competitive edge,” Li said.

Some jobs are disappearing faster than others. The backbone of autonomous vehicle companies relies on data labeling companies. In the past, humans would label photos and videos of streets and indicate what is a car, a bike, or a pedestrian. The data labels help train driverless cars to identify and avoid hitting other vehicles or humans. 

Data labeling firm Boden AI, said now AI can do the same work around three times faster, or more.

“AI data labeling can greatly reduce labor costs. In the past, we needed one person to label the data and another to verify the results, but now AI can do the initial labeling,” Boden AI staffer Chu Haolei, said.

He said humans are still needed to check the accuracy of the data labels.

Marketplace checked in with a data labeling company it had interviewed in 2021 and found that the company has mostly shifted focus to other sectors as their work got replaced by machines.

Other companies emphasized that AI can slot in where there isn’t enough human expertise, such as Alibaba affiliate Ant Group’s AI doctor.

The avatar, named Doctor Mao, would respond to patients who speak as they would to a human doctor, as Ant Group’s Anni Chen demonstrated for Marketplace.

“Hi Doctor Mao, I keep waking up early these past two days, what’s up with that?” she asked the AI doctor.

AI Doctor Mao remained motionless as it processed the question. Nine seconds passed before it responded that Chen has “sleep maintenance disorder,” which could be caused by anxiety, depression or stress.

“I advise you to keep a regular schedule of work and sleep. Avoid long naps. Reduce screen time before bed. If your symptoms last for more than two weeks and you are feeling low in spirit, I advise you to see a mental health doctor to get an evaluation,” AI Doctor Mao said.

Ant Group said they have created AI avatars of famous doctors in China, including their clinical data and research. Plus, they pool together resources from 5,000 hospitals across China to ensure accuracy in their medical advice.

“Famous doctors are a rare resource in some parts of China and many patients want to see them. They can interact with their AI avatars,” Chen said. “The AI avatars assist doctors.”

Similarly, Finger Dance’s AI avatar that simultaneously translates languages in voice or in text into sign languages said it is not out to replace human sign language interpreters. The firm’s first client is Singapore’s mass rapid transport.

“Our product aims to fill in gaps where it’s too expensive to hire human sign language translators in that situation. For example, when a deaf person comes across social media videos that don’t have closed captions, or when interacting with colleagues for daily matters,” Finger Dance’s co-founder Cheng Sirui said. “Human sign language translators can still work in professional settings.”

On the robotics floor, humanoids did tasks humans can do, including rearranging boxes, folding laundry and boxing.

One of the newer humanoid firms, Phybot, hopes to deploy its robots in factories and the logistics industry.

“We hope our robots can replace people with dangerous, repetitive and tiring jobs,” Phybot co-founder Mao Shuhan said.

A few booths down, a humanoid was playing a famous song by Taiwanese singer Jay Chou on a steel drum. The tune was slightly off key. Walking past was Mao Ziheng, of no relation to Phybot’s Mao, and his nine-year-old daughter. Like many of the 300,000 visitors, he brought his child along to see frontier technology.

However, he said he was disappointed with what was on offer this year.

“I’ve not seen anything impressive,” Mao said. “The data of a lot of the chatbots, including Deepseek, is not up to date. I tried to look up some financial statements and the information was about a year behind.”

Mao is also not worried about being replaced by robots.

“I’m in food delivery and autonomous cars are not even allowed in most places in China. How can they replace us delivery guys? Not likely in the short term,” he said.

However, no job lasts forever, according to Finger Dance’s Cheng.

“Yes, AI will reduce the number of jobs like in customer service. But I think AI can solve 80% of the trivial work and we as humans can focus on the key jobs,” he said, adding that software engineering might be a key job.

And new jobs will be created for humans, according to Phybot’s Mao.

“For example, in our research and development of robots, we need humans to do robot testing and safety checks,” he said.

AI vlogger Li Qinze, not related to SenseTime’s Li, said people in Generation Z like him have learned to embrace AI.

“When I was in school, we talked about being replaced by AI and we accepted it ... We thought more about what we could do with AI when we had it,” Li said. “The development of AI is unstoppable in every corner of the world.”

Later, a young AI worker told Marketplace off mic that it was futile to resist AI.

“We have to learn to work with AI or risk getting replaced by it,” he said.

Additional research by Charles Zhang