Artificial intelligence offers new impetus for the rapid advancement of live-streaming e-commerce. However, in the field of tourism product live-streaming, there is currently a dearth of research pertaining to users’ digital engagement behavior when artificial intelligence is integrated into this domain. Drawing on the new application model of artificial intelligence in live-streaming, this study utilizes tourism product live-streaming data from the Taobao platform to investigate the influence of virtual streamers on users’ digital engagement and its boundaries. The findings are as follows: (1) compared with human streamers, virtual streamers can bring more monetary digital engagement behaviors, but the effect is relatively poor on some non-monetary digital engagement behaviors; (2) the type of tourism products moderates the effect of streamer types on users’ digital engagement behaviors. Virtual streamers possess a competitive advantage in influencing monetary digital engagement behaviors pertaining to transportation, hotel, and ticket products; notably, they exhibit a pronounced impact on the sales of transportation products as compared to hotel and ticket offerings; (3) the impact of virtual streamers on users’ digital engagement behaviors for tourism products exhibits temporal variation, with the most promising prospects for their future application lie in the transportation products live-streaming. This study confirms the impact of artificial intelligence technology on tourism product live-streaming, and provides theoretical support for the virtual streamers layout.