Alibaba says Austin Li sold 100,000 AI memberships within 30 minutes

AI access has joined the celebrity livestream shopping pitch in China. Alibaba said Austin Li sold 100,000 monthly memberships to its QwenWork office AI service within half an hour during a Taobao Live broadcast. The Singles’ Day promotion delivered a large sales count, but the size of the discount remains unclear.

The Lipstick King’s first AI pitch

The broadcast took place on Monday, according to Reuters’ November 3 report. It was Li’s first sale of AI products. Known as the “Lipstick King” for building a huge following selling lipstick, he presented QwenWork token plans alongside AI-enabled laptops and workplace devices.

Chen Yusen, an Alibaba Group vice president and QwenWork’s chief executive, joined the broadcast. Li asked whether AI could create a digital version of him to talk to fans around the clock. Chen’s answer was more modest: AI could not replace Li, but he hoped it could handle everyday tasks and leave users more time with their families.

About 2 trillionTokens represented by the memberships

Alibaba’s total describes the access sold, not tokens buyers had already used. Tokens are units of text processed by AI models.

A dedicated storefront for AI credits

Li’s sale formed part of Tmall’s Singles’ Day AI-token promotion. Alibaba said its shopping platform had launched an AI Token Center offering consumer packages from Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Z.AI. Reuters described this as the first Singles’ Day to feature AI-token packages as a significant consumer product category.

Alibaba also said AI-token-plan sales from October 1 through October 20 rose 450% from the previous month. That company-supplied figure measures sales growth ahead of the livestream, rather than the volume generated by Li’s pitch.

The case for stocking up—and against it

Omdia chief analyst Lian Jye Su told Reuters that Chinese consumers were accustomed to AI productivity tools. Frequent users can exhaust their credits, he said, making purchases during a sales period reasonable. Relatively long token expiry periods could also encourage people to buy ahead.

But Su warned that fast-changing AI products create a risk for prepaid buyers: a service could be replaced or retired. A long window to spend credits is useful only if the service remains one the buyer wants to use.