Alipay deploys AI to test for hair loss as payment app pushes further into users’ lives

The largest mobile wallet in China, operated by Ant Group, has a new mini app that uses AI to assess images of a head and estimate whether a user is balding

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Hair issues afflict one in six people in China, and a new AI-powered feature on Alipay is promises to help people self-assess whether they are balding. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 9:00pm, 9 Jun 2024

Alipay, the ubiquitous Chinese mobile payment service operated by Ant Group, has added a hair loss testing feature that uses artificial intelligence (AI) in its latest effort to push further into consumers’ everyday lives.

The feature is meant to help people self-test for balding by uploading four pictures covering the front, top and sides of a head. It also offers suggestions for whether to seek medical advice.

The platform is powered by Ant’s own AntBrayer multimodal model, which includes both language and image recognition. It was trained on the data of thousands of real-life cases, according to Ant.

Alipay is one of China’s top two mobile payment solutions, which together with Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay account for more than 90 per cent of the market. While WeChat Pay was built on the back of the popularity of China’s biggest super app, WeChat, Alipay has been looking for ways of making its app more sticky by adding new functionality covering a variety of areas such as finance, lifestyle, healthcare and some social functions.

Ant is the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.

The baldness checker quickly caught the attention of netizens in China, where nearly one in six, or more than 250 million people, have dealt with issues related to hair loss, according to a survey by China’s National Health Commission in 2020. A growing number of young Chinese have started to take notice of hair-related issues amid increasing levels of stress, pollution and unhealthy lifestyles.