BUSINESS

Cover Story: China’s AI Battle Moves From Chatbots to Agents

By Guan Cong, Yang Zurui, Qu Yunxu and Kelsey Cheng

Published: Oct. 12, 2026 4:12 p.m. GMT+8

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Chinese tech giants including Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance are betting that enterprise agents capable of completing office tasks will reshape workplace software.

Upload a set of spreadsheets to Tencent’s WorkBuddy and an agent can analyze the data and build an interactive dashboard. Ask ByteDance’s Doubao Work to go through product comments, and it can identify what buyers like, recommend products to promote, and prepare advertising images and copy in several languages.

ByteDance Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. are reorganizing products and teams around AI agents that can carry out office tasks across apps, betting that the software workers use to get things done will become a new gateway to customers.

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What Happened When

2026-06-17：: Tencent Cloud showcases WorkBuddy at the 2026 China International Financial Exhibition in Shanghai.

2026-07：: AI office products in China had a combined 102 million users, up 8.2% from a year earlier; WorkBuddy had 6.58 million monthly active users; Doubao had 310 million users for work; Qwen app had 126 million; Alibaba combined QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun under QwenWork platform; ByteDance split Feishu’s product and sales functions.

2026-08：: ByteDance brought its coding tool Trae and agent platform Coze into the AI product unit.

2026-09-04：: Alibaba said QwenWork had more than 30 million users.

2026-09-15：: ByteDance’s Feishu unveils Feishu 8.0 and Doubao Work Partner.

2026-09-23：: Visitors inspect Alibaba’s QwenWork at the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou.

2026-09：: Tencent said QClaw would be discontinued within three months; ByteDance Chief Executive Liang Rubo introduced Doubao Work; Meta introduced Muse personal-agent app.