On the afternoon of November 4, it was announced that on October 12 of this year, the industry's first "Smart Home Service Training Center," jointly established by JD.com (NASDAQ: JD) Housekeeping and Shanghai, was officially opened.
This center focuses on digital and intelligent home services, building practical training areas for daily cleaning, home appliance cleaning, organizing and storage, maternal and infant care, elderly care, and pet services. It integrates human-machine collaboration into housekeeping skills training and, through digital training practices such as AI service reports, intelligent assessment systems, and data collection systems, helps housekeeping practitioners move from simply "being able to do the work" to a model that is "standards-based and assessable."
In addition, the training center innovatively adopts a cooperation model of "government support, enterprise construction and operation, and open social welfare," creating a housekeeping skills talent cultivation platform that combines skills training, job placement, and industry demonstration. It has also obtained JD.com Housekeeping's first vocational skills training school qualification and opened intelligent service training resources to the entire industry.
According to Yang Denghui, head of national training at JD.com Housekeeping, the company has already built a three-tier training base system covering cities, districts, and counties, along with a nationwide standardized training system. Its national training bases train more than 200,000 people annually and create 100,000 job opportunities each year.
It is understood that there are more than 2 million registered housekeeping companies, but the industry still has the characteristics of being small, fragmented, and disorderly. Asked why JD.com decided to enter the housekeeping industry in 2021, Yang Denghui said that user demand is upgrading, the economy is developing, people's desire for a better life is growing stronger, their requirements for happiness in daily life are rising, and naturally their standards for housekeeping services are also increasing. "But for a long time, there has been no truly standardized, high-quality housekeeping service brand in the market." He mentioned that when JD.com decided to enter housekeeping that year, it insisted on providing self-operated services. "Housekeeping is a service industry, and it is inherently very difficult to do. Moreover, the industry has long centered on an intermediary model, but its control and management of service quality on the supply side are very weak, because that requires a large amount of cost investment. However, JD.com Housekeeping insisted on self-operation from the very beginning and has advanced it as a strategic-level project."
What improvements can AI bring to the housekeeping industry? Yang Denghui introduced that JD.com Housekeeping is currently experimenting with AI applications at three levels. The first is the training scenario. The training center is equipped with an intelligent assessment system that uses AI to identify service personnel's operating procedures and cleaning results and determine whether they comply with standards, thereby improving the standardization and scalability of training. At the same time, online courses combine service personnel service data and user evaluations to automatically match suitable specialized courses online. The second is the display of service results. In the past, whether something was clean or not depended entirely on subjective feeling. Now JD.com Housekeeping has begun trials in some cities. After obtaining user authorization, it takes before-and-after photos of major service scenarios and uploads them. The system identifies and compares details in the before-and-after images to help determine cleaning results and provide service suggestions. The third is human-machine collaboration. JD.com Housekeeping has begun exploring the integration of human-machine collaboration into service training, allowing trainees to learn and practice working alongside people and intelligent devices in real household scenarios. In the future, housekeeping service personnel will become a professional occupation enhanced by technology, rather than replaced by it. At present, services such as glass cleaning, deep cleaning for newly occupied homes, in-home cooking, and mite removal have already explored intelligent upgrades, and more service scenarios will be explored in the future. "We believe that in future service scenarios, service personnel will be like household managers of intelligent machines, going to customers' homes with various embodied robots and smart devices to work. People will mainly be responsible for complex scenario judgment, upfront risk handling, and emotional communication with users. Housekeepers will become a professional occupation strengthened by intelligent devices," Yang Denghui said.
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