Meituan opens its in-house AI workbench to merchants after three years of internal testing

Meituan has opened its in-house AI workbench to merchants, according to Sina, after the tool spent three years in internal testing involving roughly 90,000 people.

The long internal incubation means the workbench was stress-tested across real business scenarios inside Meituan's ecosystem before being productized for outside merchants.

For merchants, a tool that has survived mass internal use offers a lower trial-and-error cost: its capabilities and stability have already been hammered out in live operations.

The move also reflects a broader shift in local-life platforms, where competition is moving from traffic to AI tooling, and merchants gravitate toward platforms that make their operations easier.

By productizing an internally proven AI workbench and opening it to merchants, Meituan's AI strategy is visibly moving from internal efficiency to external enablement.

The key things to watch are which merchant scenarios the workbench covers — content generation, customer service, or business analytics — and how quickly adoption takes off once it is generally available.