On June 8, WeChat officially released the “Guidelines for Developers’ Access to the WeChat AI Ecosystem”, opening up WeChat AI Agent access capabilities to developers and providing two access modes, automatic and development, for mini program developers.
In just a few days, platforms such as JD.com, Meituan, Ctrip, Didi, Tongcheng, and Dewu successively announced their inclusion in the first batch of internal testing lists, covering multiple core life scenarios such as e-commerce, food delivery, travel, and tourism.
The home appliance industry also quickly followed suit.
Midea Whole House Intelligence, Haier Smart Home, TCL Industrial and other companies have become the first batch of home appliance brands to participate in the internal testing of WeChat Agent and complete access adaptation.
This scene is reminiscent of the DeepSeek access wave sweeping the home appliance industry in early 2025.
At the beginning of 2025, as DeepSeek quickly became popular around the world, many home appliance companies such as Midea, Haier, Hisense, TCL, Changhong, and Skyworth successively announced access to large model capabilities.
“AI home appliances” has suddenly become one of the hottest topics in the industry, and major companies have shown their determination to embrace artificial intelligence to the market.
However, when the craze gradually returned to rationality, the industry found that after this vigorous leap in AI power, there were not many results that truly formed a differentiated experience.
Because everyone is connected to the same basic model, enterprise competition quickly returns to its original point – back to traditional dimensions such as product experience, technology research and development, and scenario innovation.
In the following year, various companies began to develop their own large models, vertical scene training and smart home capability building, hoping to build their own AI barriers.
Will this WeChat AI wave be the same as last year?
It’s actually different.
The essence of the DeepSeek access wave is the determination of home appliance companies to declare “I am All IN AI” and introduce DeepSeek to improve their AI capabilities.
The WeChat AI ecosystem will break down the ecological fragmentation problem that smart homes have never solved.
The growth ceiling of cultivating a single product is close to the limit, and it has become the consensus of the entire industry that the Internet ecosystem is the future growth point.
However, no matter how brands delve into the performance of their products, the ultimate question cannot be avoided: “How do users use these capabilities?”
According to the access plan announced by WeChat, AI Agent does not directly replace enterprise services, but undertakes functions such as demand understanding, task dismantling, capacity scheduling, and result feedback.
Developers still have the autonomy to define capabilities, encapsulate skills, and open services. Specific services are still completed by the company’s own mini programs and business systems.
This means that WeChat hopes to play not a service provider, but an intelligent hub connecting users and services.
Behind this positioning, WeChat’s biggest advantage is reflected – the user portal.
In the past few years, the smart home industry has been looking for the ideal control entrance.
From brand APPs to smart speakers, from smart screens to home central control devices, all types of terminals have had high hopes.
However, the reality is that even if the devices are connected to the Internet, there are still high barriers to use between different brands and different ecosystems.
Users often need to download multiple apps and bind multiple accounts to complete home device management.
WeChat has naturally different advantages.
As one of the Internet applications with the widest coverage and the highest frequency of use in China, it has become an important entrance to users’ daily digital lives.
In other words, after accessing DeepSeek, users still need to enter the brand APP to invoke relevant AI capabilities; in the future, under the WeChat AI ecosystem, users may only need to express their needs through natural language and send voice to complete service invocation and device control.
For the smart home industry, this is undoubtedly an efficient new solution for the connection between people and devices – WeChat is responsible for understanding needs and coordinating execution, while brands provide specific service capabilities through mini programs.
At present, Midea has completed access adaptation as one of the first batch of whole-house smart internal testing companies.
Through WeChat AI Agent, users can use natural language to control core home appliances such as air conditioners, water heaters, washing machines, air purifiers, and hoods, and implement high-frequency operations such as equipment switching, mode adjustment, and status query.
In the future, the two parties will further expand the whole-house intelligent control scenario and explore full life cycle service capabilities such as pre-sales consultation, simplified network distribution, knowledge Q&A, and after-sales guarantee.
Haier Smart Home is the first to connect WeChat AI Agent with the whole-house intelligent system, enabling access to core home appliance categories such as wall-mounted air conditioners, vertical air conditioners, gas water heaters, and electric water heaters.
In addition to device control and status query, users can also call preset scenes such as “One-click to leave home”, “One-click to go home” and “Smart Living Room” through natural language to achieve multi-device linkage control.
TCL Industrial’s mini programs have completed access and testing verification for core categories such as TVs and air conditioners.
Relying on the capabilities of WeChat AI Agent and Honghu Laboratory’s technology accumulation in the field of AI, TCL plans to further expand access categories and application scenarios and explore more application possibilities of “AI + home appliances”.
Judging from the current public information, the WeChat AI ecosystem is forming a new collaborative system composed of “AI agents + platform service providers + brand merchants”.
Among them, WeChat AI Agent is responsible for understanding user needs, dismantling tasks and scheduling execution; platform companies such as JD.com and Meituan provide commodity, distribution and life service capabilities; brand merchants including home appliances undertake specific services and product delivery through mini programs.
At the same time, voice assistants from mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, Honor, and Xiaomi have also been included in this ecosystem, providing users with multiple access methods besides WeChat.
In this system, smart home is regarded as one of the scenarios with the greatest potential for implementation.
Compared with low-frequency decision-making scenarios such as shopping and takeout, home device control has the characteristics of high frequency, real-time, and multi-device collaboration, and has higher demands for natural language interaction and agent scheduling capabilities.
A simple sentence on WeChat, “Turn the air conditioner in the living room to 26°C” or “I’m going home” may involve coordinated execution between multiple devices, multiple scenarios and even multiple brands.
Industry insiders believe that as the WeChat AI ecosystem continues to open up and more companies join in, AI Agent is expected to become a new generation of smart home entrance after APPs and smart speakers.
In the future, industry competition will also extend from single hardware performance to AI service capabilities, scene collaboration capabilities, and ecological integration capabilities.
This may have an even more profound impact on the smart home industry.
