Alibaba breaks through in local life

Alibaba once again wielded its AI sword in the local lifestyle battlefield.

Following the release of the Street Scanning List last year, on January 7, Amap made another move by launching the "Amap Street Scanning List 2026," with the trump card being the long-awaited world model. It is understood that merchants only need to upload photos or videos to quickly generate 3D modeling similar to real scene store visits, allowing users to immerse themselves in the store's interior and exterior environment through VR before arriving, experiencing the scenery along the way, parking situation, window seat availability, and more.

The world model can be considered a new trend in the AI field. Unlike large language models that can only chat, it enables AI to understand the physical world and predict future changes like humans. Amap officially announced it would invest hundreds of millions in computing resources to incorporate this into the Street Scanning List, seemingly using a "cannon to hit a mosquito."

Industry insiders view this as Alibaba's "ecological raid" in the local lifestyle sector—using its AI strengths to reshape the connection between merchants and consumers.

In fact, for a long time, the online display format of local lifestyle services has remained in the text and image era. Meituan and Dianping have built a content moat relying on over a decade of accumulated user reviews and merchant images.

Under the traditional model, merchants face a high barrier to replicating the spatial feel of physical stores in the digital world. Alibaba's Tongyi Laboratory's visual generation large model technology addresses this pain point. It compresses what originally required tens of thousands of yuan and weeks of professional work into "zero threshold."

For merchants, this is an upgrade in marketing dimensions; for users, 3D store exploration provides an immersive experience of "what you see is what you get": Is the seating spacious? Does the decor have style? How's the view from the window seat? Information that previously required piecing together from dozens of reviews can now be intuitively perceived with a swipe of the finger.

Industry experts believe that Alibaba is attempting to cut off Meituan's traffic at the very front end of user decision-making—during the "where to eat" phase—by enhancing the granularity and realism of information display.

Sun Chong, product manager of Amap's "Flying Street View," told Wall Street Journal that Flying Street View is not just a showcase of technology, but a bridge built by Amap for users, crossing the vast gap between online information and offline experience.

At this point, Amap has evolved from a simple navigation tool into Alibaba's primary spearhead against Meituan.

Over the past twenty years, Amap has accumulated vast amounts of spatiotemporal data about people, vehicles, roads, and stores. Now, Amap weaves these accumulations into an insightful network. In August last year, Amap completed its full AI transformation and shifted towards spatial intelligence, releasing the "Amap Street Scanning List" the following month.

This product, designated as an "S-level strategic project" internally by Alibaba, directly targets Meituan's core profit source—"in-store business."

Meituan's moat consists of two parts: one is the fulfillment capability formed by a large network of delivery riders, and the other is the bilateral network effect created by a vast number of merchants and users. In response to the former, Alibaba engages in a battle through Ele.me; for the latter, Alibaba has chosen to exchange time with AI technology this time.

It is important to note that map apps are the most precise physical interfaces connecting online and offline. However, Amap's long-standing pain point has been its heavy tool attributes and weak content attributes. Users are accustomed to using Amap for navigation but prefer Meituan for finding stores Data shows that in 2024, Meituan's annual transaction user count will exceed 770 million, and the number of active merchants will increase to 14.5 million, creating a wide moat for the company. Since its establishment in 2003, Dianping has accumulated a vast amount of user-generated content, with a total of 363 million authentic reviews by 2024. These two core metrics will continue to grow in 2025.

This content moat, along with the consumer habit of "checking reviews before dining out," is clearly something Alibaba will find difficult to replicate in the short term, but Alibaba has quickly identified a flaw.

Currently, merchants are extremely sensitive to marketing budgets. Meituan's bidding ranking and commission model have placed significant pressure on merchants. Instead of relying on subjective text reviews, a street ranking based on the real offline behavior data of over 1 billion users from Amap, including navigation to stores, search queries, and favorite actions, has been launched.

However, Meituan quickly began to counterattack, announcing the "restart of quality takeaway" service on Dianping, utilizing its self-developed B-end large model in conjunction with the vast amount of authentic dine-in review data accumulated on the platform, while also launching an active merchant support plan. These measures are aimed at consolidating its merchant base and preventing high-quality merchants from shifting to Alibaba's platform.

But Alibaba CEO Eric Wu has stated that the biggest variable in the next decade will be the profound changes brought about by AI across the industry. Alibaba is attempting to use AI as the key to unlock new doors in local life. When Amap can restore offline scenarios in a more three-dimensional and authentic way than Meituan, it will possess differentiated competitive capital.

Alibaba has a natural advantage in the research and implementation efficiency of AI tools, with strong computing power infrastructure and large model capabilities. Transforming these underlying technical advantages into business "killer apps" is key for Alibaba to seek growth in an era of stock competition. In contrast, Meituan will need to invest more time and financial resources to achieve the same level of technical coverage to maintain its position.

Overall, Alibaba is attempting to shift the competitive dimension towards its strengths in "computing power" and "algorithms" to avoid disadvantages in "ground promotion" and "operations." The ongoing rivalry between the two is essentially a strategic positioning for the dominance of local life services in the next decade.

Of course, merely "flying street views" is not enough to completely overturn Meituan's dominance. User consumption habits have significant inertia, and the core of local life services ultimately still needs to return to price, taste, and fulfillment services. The future situation remains full of uncertainties.

However, Alibaba's actions have sent a clear signal: the second half of the local life battlefield will no longer be a simple subsidy war or traffic distribution, but rather a revolution of efficiency empowered by technology.

For Alibaba, launching an AI-driven assault on local life aims to prove that in the era of AI, giants that possess the most advanced productive forces still have the ability to rewrite the old order