Bringing Personalization Back to E-Commerce via Virtual Live Streaming

Virtual live streaming is widely regarded as the next frontier in e-commerce. Constrained by current hardware and technology limitations, this field remains a blue ocean. Traditional e-commerce has succeeded tremendously in the Web 2.0 era thanks to digital transformation and personalized recommendations. Live streaming has been proven to be a valuable tool for delivering an immersive and interactive experience. However, it has lost the essence of e-commerce: personalization. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content and “AI being” sheds light on this area. In this article, we consider virtual live streaming as a new transformation enabled by data and AI technologies that have the potential to reshape the e-commerce industry. As this evolution is incremental, we propose a system framework to support the development of virtual live streaming, ultimately bringing personalization back to marketing.