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There has been a lot of hand-wringing about artificial intelligence (AI) possibly costing real people their jobs. Those concerns are not unfounded. AI sales avatars are already outperforming human salespeople in China by working 24 hours, 7 days a week, and achieving higher conversion rates.
A recent article by Wired shared one example of how an AI avatar does a job that used to be performed by a human, and does it better.
Unless you pay close attention, it can be hard to catch her glitches. But every few minutes, the salesperson will suddenly freeze her body for several seconds while her lips keep moving — it looks out of sync. That glitch, and some of the salesperson’s other stilted movements, are telltale signs that she’s not a human, but instead a “virtual human” AI-powered salesperson avatar that streams 24/7. Her Taobao broadcast includes a disclosure that it’s an “AI streamer” in the lower half of the screen, but it’s easy to miss because it’s almost entirely covered by the comment features in the app.
That virtual salesperson is working for Brother printers. And according to AI Magazine, “Within just two hours of deployment, Brother’s AI avatar secured $2,500 in printer sales, representing a 30% enhancement over traditional livestream sales.”
“Every morning, we check the data to see how much our AI host sold while we were asleep,” Brother said in a press release. “It’s now part of our daily routine.”
The AI avatar was created by a marketing company in Shaghai called PLTFRM. They use AI video models from Baidu and large language models from DeepSeek to generate scripts, greet customers, share basic information about the products they are selling, and respond to questions. These virtual salespeople, which used to rely on pre-recorded responses can now converse on the fly, giving potential customers live feedback.
That doesn’t mean humans have become completely obsolete when it comes to sales. At least not yet. Alexandre Ouairy, the cofounder of PLTFRM, says sometimes they will do hybrid livestreams, where a real human salesperson works for a few hours then switches places with an AI avatar.
“You can only do a livestream as a real person for three or four hours. After that, you lose your voice, you get tired,” Ouairy told Wired. “So we launch the virtual version of that person to take over while [the real human] is resting.”
That’s the problem. Humans need to rest. As AI Magazine points out, “the cost-effectiveness of continuously active AI sales staff suggests a likely broader displacement of human roles.”
“When we look at the sales, the sales are better for the first few minutes or the first hour with a real person, but then it goes down because that person gets tired,” Ouairy added. “It’s very tiring to do a real-person livestream where you have to look at the product, interact with the audience, prepare your pitch for the next product. It’s a lot of concentration involved, and so us humans have our limitations. The host will get less smiley, less engaging, and so on. The virtual human is very standardized in terms of attitude.”