To have a coffee delivered to an office in Shanghai, simply ask one of China’s artificial-intelligence super-apps to choose a brew on your behalf, press “confirm” and the beverage will be on its way. Delegating such important decisions brings risks, of course. When your correspondent asked one popular AI app to deliver a “special coffee”, he received a rose-petal-vinegar-flavoured one.
Nevertheless, the pace with which such services are being adopted in China is remarkable. Already more than 600m of its people are thought to have used some form of so-called agentic app. China is speeding towards a future in which AI chooses, purchases and delivers many of the goods and services people consume, upending its digital economy in the process.