To The Moon

At its 14th annual Product Knowledge Competition, Shuyu Pingmin Pharmacy Chain Co., Ltd. (“SYPM”) introduced YXT.com Group Holding Limited ( $云学堂(YXT)$ yxt ) and its AI-powered practical training platform. By integrating real-world pharmacy service scenarios into the competition, the initiative attracted more than 11,000 health consultants and store managers, covering multiple dimensions of employee capabilities, from product knowledge to practical service application. It offers a new example of how AI can support talent development at scale across frontline teams.

Now in its 14th year, the competition introduced a new challenge: employees were required to engage in multiple rounds of dialogue with AI-simulated customers to demonstrate their service capabilities. This change reflects a broader shift in talent development across the pharmaceutical retail industry, from assessing knowledge acquisition to developing practical workplace skills. It also demonstrates how AI can be integrated more deeply into real-world enterprise operations.

From Knowledge Acquisition to Practical Application: AI Transforms Skills Assessment

As one of China's large pharmaceutical retail chains, SYPM operates more than 9,000 stores and employs over 16,000 frontline health consultants. As its retail network and service workforce continue to expand, ensuring that employees can translate professional knowledge into effective in-store service has become an important talent development priority.

Traditional knowledge competitions can assess employees' understanding of product information, but they cannot fully recreate the complexity of real customer interactions. When serving customers, health consultants need to do more than understand product details. They must ask the right questions, identify customer needs, address concerns, and make informed professional judgments based on individual circumstances. Knowing the correct answers does not necessarily mean delivering effective service in practice.

This year, SYPM introduced AI into the competition in two stages. During the preliminary round, the company used its internally developed AI Q&A assistant to help participants look up product information and answer questions. In the subsequent round, it introduced YXT's AI-powered practical training platform, which featured 10 common in-store service scenarios based on actual business situations. AI simulated different types of customers and engaged participants in multiple rounds of interactive dialogue.

During these simulated conversations, AI-simulated customers responded to employees' answers with follow-up questions or additional information. Participants were required to adjust their communication strategies based on the evolving context. The assessment thus expanded beyond answering standardized knowledge questions to evaluating practical service capabilities, including needs identification, knowledge application, and communication skills. Business behaviors that were previously difficult to observe and assess systematically could now be practiced and evaluated in a more structured environment.

Turning Business Experience into Trainable Workplace Capabilities

The value of this collaboration extends beyond adding an AI component to a traditional competition. It also represents an exploration of how a company's accumulated product knowledge, service standards, and business experience can be transformed into practical scenarios that employees can repeatedly practice.

Through YXT's AI-powered practical training platform, SYPM incorporated common in-store service scenarios into the training process, allowing employees to respond to different customer needs in simulated environments, practice communication approaches, and test their ability to apply knowledge in real-world situations. Compared with relying solely on courses and question banks, this approach more closely reflects actual job requirements and provides enterprises with a new way to conduct practical training at scale.

Competition data illustrates the scale of the initiative: more than 11,000 health consultants and store managers participated in the preliminary round, 800 advanced to the next round, and 80 ultimately qualified for the final. The inclusion of AI-powered practical exercises in the selection process means that real-world service capabilities have become an additional focus in talent assessment, creating a more direct connection between the product knowledge competition and employees' daily responsibilities in stores.

For retail chains with extensive store networks and large frontline workforces, transforming knowledge scattered across training courses, internal policies, and the experience of high-performing employees into standardized and replicable workplace capabilities is an important organizational challenge. AI-powered simulation training offers a new approach to this process. Its long-term value will need to be further evaluated through ongoing indicators such as employee training performance and in-store service quality.

From AI Tools to Intelligent Productivity: Bringing AI into Real-World Business Scenarios

SYPM's experience reflects YXT's broader “Intelligent Productivity” strategy. YXT aims to help enterprises build and operate intelligent knowledge systems while using AI agents to support job-specific tasks and business workflows, enabling organizational knowledge to move beyond accumulation and dissemination toward practical application.

Under this approach, AI is no longer limited to answering questions or generating content. It is increasingly being integrated into workplace tasks and business scenarios, allowing employees to practice in environments that closely resemble their actual work, receive feedback, and continuously improve their performance. Enterprise knowledge can thereby be translated into practical employee capabilities, while successful practices can be further captured and preserved as a foundation for organizational learning and knowledge reuse.

From a product knowledge competition held for 14 consecutive years to the introduction of AI-simulated customers and multi-round practical training this year, SYPM continues to explore new approaches to talent development. For YXT, this collaboration represents another practical application of its “Intelligent Productivity” strategy in a customer's real business environment, using AI to connect enterprise knowledge, job-specific capabilities, and service workflows, and creating new possibilities for frontline talent development at scale.

About YXT.com

YXT.com (NASDAQ: YXT) is a technology company focusing on enterprise productivity solutions. With a mission to "Empower people and organization development through technology," the Company strives to become the supreme provider in building and boosting enterprise productivity by combining over a decade of experience in tech-enabled talent learning and development and with AI-augmented task copilots and unleashing the power of knowledge and synergy. Since its inception, YXT.com has supported and received recognition from numerous Global and China Fortune 500 companies.