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Meituan launches AI agent Xiaomei for food delivery, services
Meituan has launched an AI agent app called Xiaomei to support its food delivery and local services business in China.
Xiaomei, built on Meituan’s LongCat AI model, enables users to order food and book restaurants using voice commands, and can provide meal recommendations.
Meituan is a major food delivery and local services platform in China.
The launch comes as Meituan faces increased competition from Alibaba’s Ele.me and JD.com, with all three companies recently pledging to avoid price wars after regulatory warnings.
Alibaba also announced an additional 1 billion yuan (US$140 million) in incentives to expand its local services business this week.
🔗 Source: Bloomberg
🧠 Food for thought
Implications, context, and why it matters.
AI voice ordering technology has proven commercially viable across restaurant chains
- Meituan’s Xiaomei agent builds on years of successful AI voice ordering implementations that have already demonstrated market viability.
- Chipotle deployed AI voice ordering across 1,800 U.S. locations by 2019, showing this technology can handle complex restaurant orders at scale1.
- Early pioneers like Say2eat launched text-based ordering in 2015, while Domino’s enhanced its Facebook Messenger chatbot to process orders with simple commands like “Pizza”2.
- Industry analysis from 2019 indicated that AI voice systems could reduce labor costs associated with order-taking by up to 25% of total labor time, providing clear operational benefits1.
Recent Meituan developments
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