Conceptual diagram of AI Photo: VCG

The nation’s technology giants are increasingly pivoting toward competition in “agentic commerce,” making major pushes to enhance consumer convenience. Analysts predicted on Sunday that the first artificial intelligence (AI) agent to surpass 300 million monthly active users (MAU) could emerge as early as this year.

In addition, industry experts widely expect multi-agent systems to emerge as a defining trend in the AI sector this year. From consumer services to organizational production, intelligent agents are evolving from auxiliary tools into new actors of the internet and a new organizational layer in enterprise operations.

Alibaba recently unveiled a major upgrade to its Qwen platform, rolling out a flagship “super AI assistant.” The launch of Qwen Task Assistant 1.0 marks its AI product’s shift from a question-and-answer tool to a task-oriented AI capable of autonomously completing complex assignments, the company told the Global Times on Sunday.

The new AI product is deeply integrated across Alibaba’s ecosystem, including Taobao, Alipay, Amap and Fliggy, supporting more than 400 core digital tasks and consumer scenarios such as “one-sentence ordering.”

Previously, while Qwen could generate recommendations based on user prompts, consumers still had to manually switch among multiple platforms to complete a purchase.

The upgrade links Qwen directly with Alibaba’s vast e-commerce ecosystem. Without leaving the chatbot interface, users can compare personalized recommendations across platforms such as Taobao and travel site Fliggy, and complete payments via Alipay, the company said.

Ecosystem synergy underpins the upgrade, forming a closed-loop, end-to-end process that for the first time enables an AI-driven “full consumption journey.” From demand analysis and product recommendations to ordering, payment and service fulfilment, the entire process is completed within the Qwen app, with payment capabilities seamlessly connected to core platforms including Taobao and Alipay.

Launched on December 1, the Doubao mobile assistant is a customized, engineering-sample handset built as a technology demonstration project in collaboration with ZTE Corp, according to media report. It can already take voice commands to order food delivery, book flights and handle complex tasks across multiple apps, including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and is reportedly expected to evolve from a supplementary tool into a system-level companion that takes over core smartphone interactions.

Some of Doubao’s planned features have been scaled back following market concerns over privacy and security.

These upgrades reflect a broader shift among some global AI companies, from a focus on foundational models to “agentic AI,” which are systems capable of executing tasks on users’ behalf with limited supervision, analysts said.

Looking ahead to China’s AI technological progress in 2026, Tian Feng, president of the Fast Think Institute and former dean of SenseTime’s Intelligence Industry Research Institute, predicted in an earlier interview that the first entry-level AI agent with more than 300 million MAUs will emerge, becoming an indispensable assistant for work and daily life. Such an agent will not only be able to search for virtually any information users care about across the internet and corporate platforms, but also autonomously execute a wide range of cross-app, composite services, he said.

The next-generation domestic open-source model DeepSeek V4 is expected to match or even surpass the most advanced closed-source large language models in the US, Tian said. “At the same time, new domestic model architectures that move beyond the Transformer framework are likely to emerge.”

Analysts said that as consumers worldwide have increasingly adopted AI-powered search as a routine habit, efficiency and real-world usability have become the key battleground in China’s competition to develop intelligent agents.

In 2025, the broad outline of this world took shape, and half of all consumers used AI when searching the internet, according to a 2025 McKinsey study.

“Intelligent agents will gradually replace existing software and become the primary interface for both personal and enterprise services,” said Chang Gaowei, founder of the ANP open-source technology community, according to the Beijing Daily. As agent-related technologies continue to advance, Chang said, the future internet will see its main actors shift from humans to intelligent agents, reducing reliance on traditional internet platforms as intermediaries.

AI is profoundly reshaping modes of production and daily services, and analysts said that China’s opportunity to compete at the forefront of this wave should not be underestimated.

China enjoys significant advantages in engineering execution and industrial deployment, and once a technological pathway is validated, it can move quickly to follow up and achieve breakthroughs in specific areas, Yao Shunyu of Tencent Holdings said, according to the Xinhua News Agency. 

However, he added that bottlenecks in computing power, a more mature AI-to-business market environment, and a stronger culture of risk-taking and innovation remain areas that require further progress.