AI in Cinemas: China Allows AI Agents for Customer Service

Chinese authorities have allowed cinemas to deploy AI agents to serve visitors, recommend films, sell tickets and help people navigate cinema complexes.

What the new guidelines include

The document encourages cinemas to diversify their business and develop formats unusual for the industry. Key additions include:

• AI agents for serving viewers: picking films, buying tickets, and finding your way around the building and the cinema complex
• Karaoke zones and other interactive entertainment spaces inside or next to auditoriums
• Coffee shops, cafés and full-service food outlets in the foyer
• Other leisure formats unrelated to traditional film screenings

The guidelines are not mandatory: each operator decides for itself which of the proposed formats to adopt, based on its local audience, geography and competitive environment.

In essence, China is legalizing what the market has long practiced informally: cinemas in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou have spent years experimenting with coffee counters, lounge areas and entertainment formats. These services now get official status, and operators can scale them without regulatory risk.

Why Chinese cinemas are looking for new models

The Chinese film industry, historically one of the highest-grossing in the world, is going through a prolonged structural crisis. The main cause is the rapid rise of the streaming platforms iQIYI, Youku and Tencent Video. These services have amassed hundreds of millions of subscribers and offer vast content libraries on any device at any time of day.

As smartphones have spread, more viewers prefer to watch new releases at home on the day they come out rather than go to a cinema. The 2020–2022 pandemic made things worse: after forced closures, part of the audience never returned to theaters, having found that watching at home is convenient enough.

As a result, cinemas must compete not only for the right to show films but for people's very willingness to leave the house. The industry is looking for ways to turn a trip to the movies into a multi-format event: dinner before the show, a karaoke evening afterward, a meetup with friends over coffee. The government guidelines create a legal basis for this.

The idea of a multifunctional leisure center has long been standard in Japan, South Korea and several European countries. In China, regulatory uncertainty got in the way: cinema operators did not always know how legal it was to expand beyond film. The new guidelines settle that question.

What AI agents in cinemas mean

Including AI agents in the list of permitted innovations is a typical step for modern China. The state consistently builds AI solutions into the consumer sector: AI assistants are already a familiar sight in shopping malls, hotels and train stations.

In cinemas, this probably means chatbots and voice assistants. They can recommend films to suit a viewer's taste, help choose seats, and answer questions via a mobile app, a lobby terminal or a voice interface. In high-traffic venues, an AI agent takes pressure off cashiers during peak hours. This is not a revolution: large cinema chains in the US and Europe have long used similar solutions. But formalizing them in Chinese government guidelines reflects a systemic logic: AI tools are being written into the regulatory framework of a growing number of industries.

What this means

The new guidelines are a pragmatic response to the attendance crisis: they give cinemas a toolkit for turning into multifunctional leisure centers. AI agents are one element of that set, on a par with karaoke and coffee, rather than a standalone technological breakthrough. For the AI industry, the precedent matters: a government norm, even a recommendatory one, that encourages deploying AI solutions in offline infrastructure.

What AI services will appear in Chinese cinemas?

AI agents for picking films, buying tickets and navigating the building and cinema complex, as well as karaoke zones and coffee shops.