❯ Meituan’s Wang Puzhong Reviews AI Transformation: All-Hands ‘Shrimp-Farming’ Push Once Cost RMB 10M a Day; CatPaw Now Covers 90,000 Employees

REVIEWIn public remarks, Wang Puzhong, CEO of Meituan’s Core Local Commerce, reviewed the company’s AI transformation with a rare admission of missteps: the February–March all-hands “shrimp-farming campaign”, which by his account at one point cost around RMB 10 million a day, also muddied real operating judgment. He attributes the difficulty of generating measurable returns from enterprise AI to four misalignments: cognition, efficiency, scenarios, and performance assessment.

STAGESIn his telling, Meituan’s AI transformation unfolded in four steps: February–March, company-wide deployment at a steep price; April, each business unit set up an AI organization and itemized its transformation steps; June–July, a horse-race mechanism confirmed that the AI transformation is a system-level project uniting business, organization, and technology — not a point tool; July, it genuinely ran end-to-end in internal product workflows and generated value.

DEPLOYMENTTaking over this phase is CatPaw, an all-scenario agent platform launched in July. Per the Meituan tech team’s blog, it has now covered 90,000 employees and built 30,000 agents. It keeps mobile and PC in real-time sync: the phone handles task initiation, progress checks, and remote sign-off on key decisions; the PC handles deep local execution — file operations, browser control, and terminal commands — and cloud mode keeps running even when the local device is off or offline. On the scenario front, it builds in industry knowledge spanning the full local-life-services chain, covering store-review diagnosis, product-copy generation, marketing-asset evaluation, campaign planning, and business-data analysis.

REPLICABLEThe “RMB 10 million a day” figure is more persuasive than any methodology — it marks the true cost of the company-wide rollout path. Companies looking to replicate the playbook should not copy CatPaw — they should copy the sequence: stand up the organization before rolling out the tools, use horse-racing to filter scenarios, align appraisal criteria with AI output; otherwise, the investment just becomes a bill.

▪ SIGNALOf the four mismatches, the deadliest is assessment — without changing the metrics, even the best tools are just a cost.