Chinese AI companies have been investing heavily to develop and promote their agentic services. In mid-February, ahead of the celebrations, Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, and ByteDance, which controls TikTok and its local sister-app, Douyin, both launched upgrades to their chatbots that allow these to perform various tasks on behalf of users. More than 100m beverages were sold via Qwen, Alibaba’s chatbot, during the Lunar New Year period. Doubao, ByteDance’s chatbot, fielded almost 2bn queries over a few hours on February 16th during a televised gala that was sponsored by the company.
