Since 2025, AI is reshaping the smart home industry at an unprecedented speed.
At first, the emergence of large models triggered a collective upsurge in the home appliance industry. Midea, Haier, Hisense, TCL and other companies have announced their embrace of AI.
However, after a round of industrial practice, the industry gradually discovered that large models improved the understanding of devices, but did not change the usage logic of smart homes. Users still need to open the brand APP, still need to enter the corresponding ecology, and still need to learn the operation methods of different brands.
In other words, the large model solves the “IQ problem” of the device, but does not solve the long-standing “entrance problem” of smart homes.
The emergence of WeChat AI Agent has allowed the industry to see another possibility for the first time.
When the super portal with 1.4 billion monthly active users begins to have the ability to understand demand, schedule services and cross-brand collaboration, the focus of smart home competition may shift from device connection to demand connection, and from the battle for device portals to the battle for demand portals. This is where the openness of WeChat’s AI ecosystem truly deserves industry attention.
On June 8, 2026, the official released the “Guidelines on Developers’ Access to the WeChat AI Ecosystem”, officially opening the WeChat AI Agent access capability to developers.
In just a few days, Internet platforms such as JD.com, Meituan, and Ctrip have intensively announced that they have entered the first batch of internal testing lists. On the home appliance track, leading brands such as Midea, Haier Smart Home, TCL, and Siemens Home Appliances have almost simultaneously unveiled their cards and announced that they have completed the first batch of adaptations.
Picture: Matrix of the first batch of head home appliance brands connected to WeChat’s AI ecosystem
Then WeChat’s pace of advancement further accelerated. On June 17, the payment side launched an AI exclusive card to open up the service link from consumption recommendations to payment decisions; on June 20, WeChat’s native AI assistant “Xiaowei” launched a small-scale internal test on the C side.
From the opening of Agent capabilities, to the access to payment capabilities, to the launch of native AI assistants, the infrastructure of the WeChat AI ecosystem has been initially built in a short period of time.
To understand the significance of WeChat’s AI entry, we first need to return to the long-standing structural dilemma of the smart home industry: in the past, the industry has been solving the problem of “device connection”, but it has never completely solved the problem of “user connection”.
From brand APPs to smart speakers, from smart screens to home central control devices, the industry has tried various entrance forms. However, the reality is that even if the devices are connected to the Internet, there are still high usage thresholds between different brands and different ecosystems. Users often need to download multiple APPs and bind multiple accounts to complete home device management. Entry fragmentation has become an important factor restricting the further popularization of smart homes.
The biggest variable of WeChat AI is the “zero threshold entry”.
For most users, WeChat has long become the infrastructure of digital life. Social networking, payment, travel, consumption, content acquisition and other behaviors are highly concentrated in the WeChat ecosystem. Users do not need to install new applications, learn new operating logic, or memorize complex device names. They only need to express their needs through natural language to complete device control and scene invocation.
Picture: WeChat AI smart home demand scheduling full-link process
This “use and go” capability essentially compresses the interactive links of smart homes.
In the past, users needed to complete the complete process of “open the APP – find the device – select the function – perform the operation”; in the future, the user may only need to say “I want to go home”, and the system can automatically complete a series of actions such as starting the air conditioner, turning on the lights, and running the air purifier.
More importantly, the WeChat AI ecosystem has not chosen to become a new smart home platform, but has positioned itself as an intelligent hub connecting users and services. The AI Agent is mainly responsible for demand understanding, task dismantling, capacity scheduling and result feedback, while specific services are still completed by the company’s small programs and business systems. This “no substitution, no cross-border” design gives it the opportunity to become a unified entrance across brands and cross-ecologies, which is precisely the most difficult ecological barrier to break through in the smart home industry for a long time.
However, returning to the actual implementation situation at this stage, WeChat AI is still in an early stage in the smart home field. Currently, it is more about changing the interaction method rather than reconstructing service capabilities. From “clicking the button” to “saying a word”, the experience has indeed improved, but there is still a certain distance from the true sense of autonomous decision-making, proactive services and cross-ecological intelligent collaboration.
From the perspective of market competition, the ecological moat of Mijia, which has been deeply involved in the smart home track for many years, is still stable. Its huge ecosystem covering thousands of devices, highly mature automation scenario capabilities, and highly sticky user mentality will be difficult to shake in the short term.
In essence, WeChat and Mijia are not competing for the same level of capabilities: Mijia’s core value is connected devices, while WeChat’s core value is connection needs. The two are more biased in misaligned competition: Mijia follows the “smart home operating system” route, attracting people who pursue in-depth intelligent experiences and are willing to pay for the entire ecosystem.
core user group; while WeChat AI takes the “super entrance” route, serving mass users who are unwilling to be bound by a single ecosystem and only want a simple intelligent experience. In the future, it is likely to form a coexistence pattern of “heavy users relying on deep ecology, and mass users obtaining lightweight experiences through WeChat AI.”
From the perspective of long-term industry evolution, the entry of WeChat AI into smart homes will have at least three long-term impacts: First, it will promote the industry to release “stock activation” dividends, greatly increasing the activity of smart devices that were “bought and not used, but not connected to the Internet” in the past; second, it will promote industry competition from device interconnection to AI service capability competition. In the future,
The core that determines user experience will be AI’s ability to understand user intentions, scenario collaboration, and proactive service capabilities; third, A2A (Agent-to-Agent) collaboration may give rise to a new industrial landscape, and agents from different brands may form a collaborative network in the future to jointly complete the response and delivery of user needs.
Looking back at the development history of the smart home industry, every industry change is accompanied by entrance changes. The PC era competes for software entrances, the mobile Internet era competes for APP entrances, and in the AI Agent era, new demand entrances are being born.
In the long term, the “super portal + AI Agent + cross-brand collaboration” model represented by WeChat is opening up new imagination space for the industry. The core of future smart home competition is not necessarily who has the most devices, but who can be the first to understand user needs, mobilize ecological resources and complete service delivery.
