By Zhou Shuyun
China’s pet care market continues its impressive expansion. According to a report on the Chinese pet industry, the number of pet dogs and cats in urban areas surpassed 126 million in 2025, propelling the overall market size to reach 312.6 billion yuan ($46.03 billion).
A new wave of pet owners, primarily from the post-90s and post-00s generations, is reshaping conventional pet care practices. The convergence of increased consumer demand and significant advances in artificial intelligence (AI) is driving the emergence of intelligent and highly personalized pet care solutions as a major industry trend.
The recently concluded sixth ONE Pet Show showcased a growing range of AI-enhanced products, encompassing everything from smart feeders and water dispensers to collars and specialized health-monitoring devices.
Pet owners like Ms. Wang highlight specific priorities when choosing automated feeders, such as precise portion control and reliable resistance to jamming. The smart feeder she currently uses features facial recognition technology. Once each cat’s information is registered into the system, food is dispensed automatically whenever a particular cat approaches the machine, essentially giving every pet its own “meal card.”
“It handles larger treats like freeze-dried food without issue,” Wang explained. “Being able to check feeding times and quantities remotely via an app while traveling is incredibly reassuring.”
Others, such as Ms. Li, emphasize the value of health monitoring. Facing the challenge of managing two cats with distinct dietary needs, she found traditional monitoring time-consuming. Her smart feeder uses feline facial recognition to enforce separate feeding schedules and portion sizes. Data syncing to her phone allows real-time dietary tracking, significantly simplifying pet care. “It eliminates the guesswork,” Li stated.
Health monitoring technology is also advancing rapidly. Smart pet collars, for instance, can continuously track activity levels, sleep duration, and heart rate. AI algorithms analyze this data, facilitating early health assessments. Alerts for anomalies like sudden drops in activity or irregular sleep patterns enable proactive intervention, shifting monitoring from reactive to preventative.
Pet product company Petkit has integrated its AI-powered visual water dispenser, AI wet-food feeder, and AI smart litter box into an interconnected smart-pet suite, accompanied by a large health-monitoring display.
The water dispenser can recognize individual pets and keep separate hydration records for multiple animals. The feeder records eating habits, provides abnormality alerts, and supports scheduled and portion-controlled feeding. The smart litter box offers facial recognition, monitors urine pH levels, and uploads health data, creating a comprehensive AI-powered ecosystem for pet care.
Venturing beyond automated feeding and health tracking, AI applications are increasingly exploring companionship and remote interaction, unlocking further possibilities within intelligent pet care.
At the smart pet technology exhibition area of this year’s ONE Pet Show, a range of new products made their debut, including AI pet phones and intelligent travel harnesses.
The brand Letapet, owned by innovative mobile technology company Ucloudlink, showcased two flagship products: PetPhone and PetCam.
According to the company, PetPhone functions as a smartphone for pets, integrating communication, safety, and health-management features. It allows owners to interact remotely with their pets through the device.
PetCam, meanwhile, features a lightweight design and can capture first-person footage from the pet’s perspective as it goes about its daily activities.
As AI rapidly penetrates a wide range of industries, local governments across China are also actively encouraging the pet economy to become a new application scenario for AI technologies.
For example, Zhejiang province in east China has issued a guideline on promoting the development of the pet economy, encouraging companies to develop smart pet products such as intelligent feeders, water dispensers, litter boxes, and drying machines.
The policy also focuses on the emerging field of pet wearables, promoting the use of sensors, communication modules, and positioning chips to analyze pets’ behavioral patterns and health conditions, while supporting the development of smart collars, harnesses, and leg bands.
Industry insiders, however, caution that AI applications in the pet sector are still at an early stage.
At present, most AI capabilities are concentrated in areas such as data recording and behavior recognition. Considerable progress is still needed before systems can accurately understand animals’ physical and emotional states and make autonomous decisions.
At the same time, challenges including high computing costs, fragmented industry data, relatively limited application scenarios, and insufficient interoperability among different devices remain obstacles that the industry must overcome to achieve its next stage of development.
AI fuels growth in China’s booming pet economy
