Harvard Business Review Publishes Research on China's Meituan AI Agent as the Agentic Commerce Archetype

Harvard Business Review published research on April 17 analyzing Meituan’s Xiaomei AI agent as the most advanced commercial deployment of what it calls an “orchestrator plus execution agent.” The piece, titled “Research: What China’s AI Agents Reveal About the Future of Commerce,” examines why Chinese super-apps have a structural head start in agentic commerce and what patterns Western platforms are replicating.

The Meituan Xiaomei Architecture

Meituan is China’s dominant lifestyle super app, combining services similar to DoorDash, Yelp, and Groupon into a single platform. When Meituan launched Xiaomei in late 2025, executives internally described it not as a chatbot but as an “orchestrator plus execution agent,” according to HBR.

The distinction matters. A chatbot answers questions. An orchestrator plus execution agent completes transactions. A user says, “Order my usual lunch, but deliver it 20 minutes later today,” and Xiaomei interprets intent, applies stored preferences, navigates across services within the Meituan ecosystem, and completes the transaction. Often with zero screen interaction beyond the initial instruction.

“The point wasn’t convenience; it was delegation,” HBR writes.

Why China Is Ahead

Chinese super-apps have a structural advantage in agentic commerce that Western platforms do not: vertical integration. Meituan controls the discovery layer (restaurant search), the transaction layer (ordering and payment), and the fulfillment layer (delivery logistics) within a single application. An AI agent operating inside Meituan can move from intent to completed transaction without crossing API boundaries between different companies.

Western platforms are fragmented by comparison. Ordering lunch in the U.S. might involve Google Search for discovery, DoorDash for ordering, and Stripe for payment, each with separate authentication, separate data, and separate APIs. Building an agent that orchestrates across those boundaries requires the interoperability infrastructure that Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Salesforce are actively constructing.

The Timing

HBR’s research arrives during a week when several Western platforms announced agentic commerce capabilities: Canva AI 2.0 with agentic orchestration for 265 million users, Salesforce AgentExchange as a unified marketplace for agents, HubSpot’s shift to outcome-based agent pricing, Amazon Ads’ MCP Server for agent-driven campaign management, and Pacvue Agent for autonomous commerce media execution. Forrester’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2026, also published this week, placed agentic commerce as a near-term priority.

The pattern is consistent. Western platforms are building toward the architecture Meituan already operates: an agent that interprets natural language intent, applies user context, and completes multi-step transactions autonomously. The difference is that Meituan can do this within one app. Western equivalents will need to do it across many, which is why the identity and interoperability standards announced this week by Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and the FIDO Alliance are prerequisites, not nice-to-haves.

The full HBR research is available at hbr.org.