拒绝被“偷懒” 这届年轻人买AI是为了“搞钱”

The consumer logic around AI-powered products has fundamentally changed. While in the past, consumers bought AI products to cut down on tedious work and save effort, today's young consumers are increasingly adopting AI tools to amplify their creativity and boost their income. This has become the core trend in the current market.

1. New product categories centered on creativity have already seen explosive growth. Data from Bilibili (B-site) shows that as of 2025, content engagement for AI glasses has surged 1,387% year-over-year, while content for AI voice recorders is up 337%. During JD.com's 618 shopping festival last year, 3D printer sales jumped 300% year-over-year, confirming these products have moved from a niche hobby to the mass market.

2. For everyday shoppers, there is no need to over-obsess over technical specifications. Instead, prioritize whether a product fits your specific creative and work scenarios. It is recommended to watch real-user reviews and tests from Bilibili creators before purchasing: nearly 90% of tech consumers research product reviews on Bilibili before making a buying decision.

3. These products deliver both emotional and practical value for young users. They provide the satisfaction of creating original work, while also acting as a production tool to open up new side income streams, offering outstanding cost-performance.

AI hardware is now entering its second wave of consumer adoption, with the core user base shifting to "creative consumers." This shift brings new growth opportunities, along with entirely new requirements for brand marketing and operations.

1. Core trend shift: User demand has moved from "saving time and replacing manual labor" to "enabling active creation through products." Young consumers now value both emotional utility and income-generation potential, meaning traditional marketing focused on technical specifications no longer resonates with target users.

2. Rethinking content marketing: Brands should shift from talking about specs to demonstrating the full capabilities of their products by building scenario-based content. Translate technical jargon into relatable use cases that everyday users can understand, and build multi-tiered ripple distribution that lets users from different communities interpret product value in their own words.

3. User operations and channel strategy: Brands can treat Bilibili as a strategic hub, leverage its community to co-create content with users, and position the brand as an "enabler of creativity." This approach builds a growth flywheel that runs from initial brand seeding to organic user-driven传播, helping brands cultivate a core base of high-engagement, high-spread users, and evolve the brand into a cultural symbol of creation.

The AI smart hardware market is undergoing structural change, creating clear new growth opportunities and operational directions for sellers to capitalize on the trend.

1. New incremental market opportunities: The traditional smart hardware market focused on labor-saving convenience is nearing saturation. By contrast, creativity-focused AI hardware such as 3D printers, AI voice recorders, and AI/AR glasses are growing explosively. Global AI usage in 2025 is projected to be 9 times higher than two years ago, with growth driven primarily by productive activities including programming, design, and content creation, leaving substantial room for expansion in this track.

2. Adjust product selection logic: Adapt to young consumers' current "productivity investment" mindset, and prioritize multi-use products that satisfy both entertainment needs and support income-generating creative work. Young shoppers now actively calculate the "payback period" of their purchases, so products with built-in production utility are far more attractive than pure entertainment devices.

3. Customer acquisition and operations: Sellers can take advantage of Bilibili's traffic dividend. The platform hosts a large concentration of core target users willing to pay for AI technology, and nearly 90% of users check Bilibili reviews before purchasing tech products. Scenario-based seeding through Bilibili creators builds user trust quickly, while also collecting actionable user feedback to refine product selection and operations.

The shifting consumer trend for AI hardware brings new commercial opportunities for manufacturing facilities, while outlining clear new directions for product R&D and digital operations.

1. Shifting product design requirements: Previously, the core design goal of smart hardware was to replace human labor and save user time. Today, user demand has shifted to enabling low-barrier creation for everyday people. Factories need to center R&D on lowering the entry barrier for everyday creators. For example, Bambu Lab has rapidly captured a large mainstream user base and achieved explosive sales by making 3D printing far more accessible to casual users.

2. New commercial opportunities: Consumer-focused AI creative hardware has moved rapidly from niche geek circles to the mass market, with demand growing exponentially. Factories can capture this growth dividend by expanding into new categories including 3D printers, AI voice recorders, and AI/AR glasses.

3. Insights for digital go-to-market: Factories can leverage Bilibili's community ecosystem to test new products and educate users. Authentic reviews from creators deliver fast access to real-user feedback to speed up product design iterations, while the platform's content ecosystem lowers the cost of user education, helping new products break into the mass market much faster.

AI hardware consumption has entered its second wave, bringing new industry trends and new pain points for brands, opening up clear new development directions for service providers serving the AI hardware sector.

1. Overall industry trend: The competitive dynamic for AI hardware has gradually shifted from early competition around hardware specifications to competition around content and use cases, and will ultimately evolve into competition around the ecosystem that enables user creation. The user identity has also shifted from passive consumer to active co-creator, with "creative consumers" now the dominant market segment.

2. Core brand pain points: Most new AI creative hardware integrate multiple complex technology fields, resulting in high user awareness and education costs. Traditional specification-focused marketing and one-way product displays fail to communicate product value to users, so brands urgently need mature solutions that can reach core users and complete effective user education.

3. Key opportunity areas for service providers: Service providers can build tailored solutions centered on content communities, helping brands connect with Bilibili creators, translate complex technical specs into concrete, relatable use cases for everyday users, and build out user co-creation operation systems to help brands cultivate core users and close the growth loop of organic user-driven传播.

The rising consumer wave for AI creative hardware brings new value growth opportunities for platforms, while also setting new requirements for platform operations and brand recruitment strategies.

1. New brand demands on platforms: Emerging AI creative hardware carries much higher user education costs than traditional consumer electronics. The one-way display model of traditional e-commerce platforms cannot meet brands' needs to communicate product value, educate users, and cultivate a core user base. Brands now need platforms that support long-form content and enable interactive user co-creation.

2. Proven effective operational models: Content communities like Bilibili already host a large base of core users who actively seek out new technology and are willing to pay for AI products. The platform supports long-form content distribution and has a highly interactive community atmosphere, enabling brands to complete user education, build user trust, and collect user feedback to refine product offerings.

3. Future platform development directions: Platforms can prioritize recruitment of AI creative hardware brands, build a dedicated content ecosystem for AI creative hardware, improve community interaction mechanisms to amplify the value of user co-creation, and position the platform as a strategic hub for AI hardware brands to test products, understand user needs, and drive growth. This creates clear differentiated competitive advantages against traditional e-commerce platforms.

This analysis outlines a completely new industrial trend in AI hardware consumption and summarizes an emerging business model, providing fresh first-hand insights for industrial research.

1. A new industrial direction: AI hardware consumption has entered its second wave, with the underlying logic shifting from the "economics of laziness" – replacing repetitive human labor – to the "economics of creativity," which centers on returning creative sovereignty to everyday users. This shift is driven by the reshaping of consumption values among young consumer groups, giving rise to an entirely new consumer persona: the "creative consumer." This segment is not satisfied with passively consuming content, and prioritizes both emotional value and income-generation efficiency.

2. An innovative business model: This analysis summarizes the new "user co-creation driven growth" model adopted by AI hardware brands on the Bilibili content community. Brands build trust through scenario-based content seeding by creators, then attract users to create their own organic content, forming a complete growth flywheel from initial brand seeding to user-led organic传播. This evolves the brand's positioning from product provider to enabler of "creative equality," and ultimately turns the brand into a cultural symbol of creation.

3. The value of industrial transformation: This wave is not a short-term marketing concept, but a deep-seated shift that is reshaping human-machine relations, consumer logic, and even work patterns. It meets young consumers' dual demands for self-fulfillment and income generation, making it a long-term, sustainable trend.