Meituan is deepening its artificial intelligence capabilities to bridge the digital and physical worlds of local commerce and travel. The Chinese superapp is pairing operational efficiency with a substantial investment in foundational AI, turning open-weight models like LongCat-2.0 into a competitive moat that extends from consumer-facing tools to merchant-side operations.
During the company's second-quarter earnings call, CEO Xing Wang highlighted a strategic shift in the quick commerce sector. “In the second quarter, the quick commerce industry shifted its focus to improving marketing and operating efficiencies,” he said. At the same time, Meituan is responding to a broader change in consumer behavior, with Wang noting, “We saw a clear shift in local services consumption from standardised spending towards more personalised, experiential, and emotion-driven experiences. Authentic experiences and deep engagement are playing an increasingly important role in consumers’ decision-making.”
For travel, where purchases are complex and trust is paramount, Meituan is anchoring its AI strategy in authentic user feedback. The company's Must-Eat List (“必吃榜”) now leverages 1.5 billion genuine user reviews, covering 264 cities and regions, with 120 new additions in Q2. Similarly, the Must-Visit List (“必玩榜”) has expanded to encompass a wider range of interest-based consumption scenarios. This vast repository of feedback provides a rich data foundation for understanding traveler preferences and improving recommendations.
Xiaotuan: From search to execution
As consumers demand more intuitive planning tools, conversational interfaces are replacing rigid directory searches. Inside the Meituan app, Xiaotuan serves as an AI-powered conversational search assistant. Wang reported rapid adoption: “For complex local services decisions, consumers increasingly turn to Xiaotuan, our AI assistant, built in Meituan App. As adoption grows, we are seeing a meaningful lift in user engagement on Meituan.”
For travelers planning multi-stop itineraries, boutique hotel stays, and dining reservations, Xiaotuan moves beyond simple chat. It acts as an execution engine, translating multi-constraint natural language inputs into seamless bookings. This capability is particularly relevant for the travel industry, where complex planning often involves multiple touchpoints.
On the merchant side, Meituan's CatPaw platform now features specialized AI agents for hotel companies, transforming the platform from a digital listing channel into an active “AI business partner.” This digital copilot streamlines daily property operations and inventory management, offering hoteliers a more integrated approach to managing their businesses.
LongCat-2.0: The architecture of local intelligence
Beneath these consumer-facing tools lies Meituan's infrastructure play in LongCat-2.0. Wang explained, “I will begin with LongCat-2.0… an important foundation for our AI strategy. What we are really focusing on is evolving our AI to bridge the digital and physical worlds, and doing so deepening Meituan’s competitive moat in local services over the long term.” He added, “For us, AI is less about competing on the models. It’s more about leveraging AI to reshape our organisation, product, and workflow.”
LongCat-2.0 is an open-weight, trillion-parameter foundation model trained entirely on Chinese infrastructure. It has made significant progress in core agentic capabilities, particularly in coding, reasoning, tool calling, and complex task execution, and has gained positive feedback from the global developer community. Wang emphasized the structural advantage: “Our full-stack domestic infrastructure for training and inference gives us a structural advantage in cost infrastructure control over the long run.”
This technological depth directly influences the product-level evolution of the superapp. Meituan is scaling Xiaotuan from understanding complex multi-constraint queries to full agentic task execution, aiming for a seamless closed-loop experience that takes users from travel discovery and decision-making through to transaction and fulfilment.
Organisationally, AI adoption is deepening internal productivity, with a rapidly climbing share of code and workflows generated by AI tools. For hoteliers and travel brands, the message is clear: the future belongs to ecosystems where open-weight intelligence bridges the gap between digital intent and the physical realities of travel and hospitality. As Meituan continues to integrate AI into its platform, it is setting a precedent for how local commerce and travel can be transformed by intelligent, data-driven solutions.
