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The IDC MarketScape: China AI Digital Human Products 2024 Vendor Assessment is a 19-page commissioned research report authored by Anne Cheng, IDC's AI Research Manager for China, published in August 2024 under document number CHC52437724. Priced at $20,000 USD and targeted at technology buyers, it represents the most authoritative independent evaluation of China's AI digital human vendor landscape produced that year, covering China exclusively.
The report follows IDC's standard MarketScape framework, which evaluates vendors on two primary axes — Strategy and Capability — using a rigorous combination of quantitative and qualitative criteria. Each vendor is assessed, then plotted on the IDC MarketScape positioning chart, which places them in one of four competitive tiers: Leaders, Major Players, Contenders, and Participants. The document contains one MarketScape positioning chart, two detailed data tables covering Key Strategy Indicators and Key Capability Indicators for China's AI digital human market, individual vendor profiles for all 16 assessed companies each with clearly delineated Strengths and Challenges, recommendations for technology buyers, vendor inclusion criteria, a full market definition, and the complete research methodology.
IDC defines AI digital humans as AI-generated virtual characters possessing human-like visual appearance, perceptual and interactive capabilities, and expressive abilities encompassing voice, gesture, and emotion. The scope of the report is intentionally focused on end-to-end digital human producers — vendors who deliver the full pipeline from character creation through to deployment — rather than point solution providers operating only in motion capture, voice synthesis, or rendering in isolation.
The 16 vendors assessed represent a wide cross-section of China's AI industry, spanning tech giants, major cloud platforms, and highly specialized AI startups.
Baidu — evaluated through its Xiling digital avatar platform, providing end-to-end services for virtual hosts, brand spokespersons, and virtual celebrities across broadcasting, finance, and retail
Mobvoi (出门问问) — assessed for its conversational digital human capabilities, known internationally for voice AI and wearables
Fengping Intelligence (风平智能) — startup tier focused on digital human production tooling
Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能) — evaluated on its DUIX platform encompassing virtual livestreaming, AI short-video production, and intelligent customer service, serving over 500,000 users with 500,000+ daily AI-generated content pieces
Huawei Cloud (华为云) — assessed as a cloud infrastructure giant bringing enterprise-grade digital human capabilities to large-scale deployments
JD Cloud (京东云) — cloud infrastructure assessed for enterprise-grade digital human deployments, naturally oriented toward retail and e-commerce applications
iFLYTEK (科大讯飞) — national AI champion with deep expertise in speech recognition and synthesis, evaluated for education and enterprise digital human services
Mofa Technology (魔珐科技) — assessed for high-fidelity 3D animated digital human production capabilities
SenseTime (商汤科技) — evaluated on its SenseAvatar platform and hyper-realistic avatar creation capabilities, underpinned by its SenseNova large model infrastructure
Tors Information Technology (拓尔思) — brings a knowledge management and NLP orientation to enterprise digital humans
Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) — assessed for omni-channel digital human deployment at scale across its vast ecosystem
Xiaoice (小冰) — originally incubated within Microsoft and now an independent Chinese AI company, evaluated for emotional AI capabilities, virtual employee products, and creative digital human experiences
AsiaInfo Technologies (亚信科技) — assessed within the context of telecom operator and enterprise digital human services
Beijing Zhongke Huilian (中科汇联) — evaluated for dialogue-driven interactive digital human capabilities
Beijing Zhongke Shenzhi (中科深智) — evaluated for digital human animation and rendering capabilities
Pursue-One Technology (追一科技) — assessed for intelligent customer service and AI digital employee agent applications
The market itself is divided into two principal application categories. Entertainment digital humans encompass virtual idols, brand ambassadors, IP characters, and gaming avatars — creative and commercial products designed for audience engagement. Enterprise service digital humans cover a far broader operational territory including AI livestream hosts, automated short-video content production, virtual customer service agents, virtual presenters, insurance agents, AI digital employees, and virtual tour guides. On the B2B demand side, the industries generating the strongest appetite for these technologies in 2024 are finance and insurance, internet and technology platforms, media and broadcasting, e-commerce and retail, government and public sector, education, telecom operators, cultural tourism, and real estate.
IDC identifies three technology investment priorities for the one-to-three year horizon. AIGC digital humans represent the broadest category, encompassing the use of generative AI pipelines to produce scalable digital human content at reduced cost and time. AI video generation refers to the automated production of video content using digital human avatars, which is rapidly becoming a core commercial use case particularly in livestreaming and short-video contexts. Multimodal large models represent the deepest technical priority, combining vision, speech, language, and motion understanding in unified foundation models that power more realistic, context-aware, and emotionally responsive avatar interactions. The broader technology stack enabling all of these applications includes 3D modeling, motion capture, digital content rendering, and voice synthesis — all of which are being actively upgraded through integration with large pre-trained model architectures.
Anne Cheng frames 2023 and 2024 as a genuine inflection point for the market, driven by the maturation of large-scale pre-trained models and the wider availability of generative AI capabilities. Vendors across the landscape are upgrading their digital human products by integrating either general-purpose semantic foundation models or industry-specific large models, with the goal of improving interaction quality and contextual relevance in targeted use cases. Looking further ahead, IDC anticipates that ultra-large pre-trained models operating specifically in the domains of facial expression, physical motion, voice, and multimodal perception will push digital human capabilities significantly forward in character modeling realism, interactive responsiveness, and autonomous decision-making. Crucially, IDC also emphasizes the democratization dynamic — as cost and technical barriers fall, the conditions are being created for personalized AI digital humans to move beyond enterprise deployments and become accessible to individuals and small businesses, potentially making the era of person-to-person AI digital human interaction arrive sooner than many expect.
For technology buyers, the report functions as both a procurement guide and a strategic orientation tool, helping organizations select the right vendor based on use case fit, technical maturity across AIGC and multimodal capabilities, strategic roadmap alignment, and the balance between broad capability and deep specialization. For vendors, placement on the IDC MarketScape chart carries meaningful market signaling value in a competitive landscape where enterprise purchasing decisions and investor perception are both heavily influenced by independent third-party assessments.
Several important limitations frame the report's scope. The full document is not publicly accessible, priced at $20,000 and available only to IDC subscribers or individual purchasers. Its geographic coverage is China only, with no comparative positioning against APAC or global digital human vendors. Published in August 2024, it does not capture significant vendor developments from the latter half of 2024 onward, including new model launches and funding activity. Notably absent from the vendor list are several major Chinese technology players including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu AI, most likely because they are not classified as end-to-end digital human producers under IDC's inclusion criteria, even though their underlying AI infrastructure significantly shapes the competitive environment that all 16 assessed vendors operate within.
Table of Contents:
IDC MarketScape Chart
Figure: IDC MarketScape: China AI Digital Human Products, 2024
IDC Perspective
IDC MarketScape Vendor Inclusion Criteria
Recommendations for Technology Buyers
Vendor Profiles
Baidu
Strengths
Challenges
Mobvoi (出门问问)
Strengths
Challenges
Fengping Intelligence (风平智能)
Strengths
Challenges
Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能)
Strengths
Challenges
Huawei Cloud
Strengths
Challenges
JD Cloud (京东云)
Strengths
Challenges
iFLYTEK (科大讯飞)
Strengths
Challenges
Mofa Technology / Magic Technology (魔珐科技)
Strengths
Challenges
SenseTime (商汤科技)
Strengths
Challenges
Tors Information Technology (拓尔思)
Strengths
Challenges
Tencent Cloud (腾讯云)
Strengths
Challenges
Xiaoice / Microsoft Xiaoice (小冰)
Strengths
Challenges
AsiaInfo Technologies (亚信科技)
Strengths
Challenges
Beijing Zhongke Huilian (中科汇联)
Strengths
Challenges
Beijing Zhongke Shenzhi (中科深智)
Strengths
Challenges
Pursue-One Technology / 追一科技
Strengths
Challenges
Appendix
Understanding the IDC MarketScape Chart
IDC MarketScape Research Methodology
Market Definition
Strategy and Capability Criteria
Table: Key Strategy Indicators — China AI Digital Human Products
Table: Key Capability Indicators — China AI Digital Human Products
Further Research
Related Research
Outline