TencentCloudExpandsAIAgentPushasYuanbaoRacestoCatchRivals

Tencent Cloud expanded its lineup of enterprise artificial-intelligence agents on Friday, as parent Tencent Holdings Ltd. steps up investment in its flagship chatbot, Yuanbao, in a bid to narrow the gap with rivals ByteDance Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

The moves underscore how the Chinese social-media and gaming giant is trying to keep pace with a fast-changing AI-agent market and tap investor enthusiasm that has recently added tens of billions of dollars to its market value.

At a product launch in Beijing, Dowson Tong, chief executive of Tencent’s Cloud and Smart Industries Group, rejected the idea that the company was encouraging internal “horse-racing” competition among AI teams. Tencent’s product groups are targeting different AI niches, he said, while the company’s established internet services are moving quickly to add AI features.

Tencent Cloud on Friday upgraded its enterprise AI-agent portfolio, introducing WorkBuddy Enterprise Edition and the Agent Suite office toolkit to address growing demand for workplace automation.

The launch followed a sharp rally in Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed shares on June 2, when reports that a WeChat AI agent was in closed beta testing helped lift the company’s market value by HK$400 billion ($51 billion) in a single day.

Tong said Tencent is drawing on its consumer-internet strengths to respond more quickly to shifts in the market. Existing tools such as Tencent Docs, he said, can be adapted into functions that AI agents can call on.

Despite the push into workplace tools, Tong said Yuanbao, Tencent’s consumer-facing chatbot, remains the company’s most heavily funded AI initiative. He acknowledged that Yuanbao’s user base still trails ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen.

To close that gap, Tencent is improving Yuanbao’s search quality, integrating real-time data sources and upgrading its underlying technology. About 80% of Yuanbao users have migrated to Hunyuan 3 Preview, Tencent’s latest large language model, a shift Tong said has significantly improved user retention.

Hunyuan 3 Preview has also gained traction outside Tencent. According to OpenRouter, a global model API platform, Hunyuan 3 Preview ranked second in weekly token consumption as of Friday, behind only DeepSeek V4 Flash.

Tencent’s AI push faces computing constraints. Tong said that over the past several quarters, Tencent has prioritized its limited graphics-processing-unit capacity for internal services, including Hunyuan, WeChat, Tencent Meeting and Yuanbao.

That allocation came at the expense of Tencent Cloud, limiting its ability to meet demand from external clients and putting the business on a different growth trajectory from global cloud providers, Tong said.

The resource constraints have weighed on Tencent Cloud’s market position. According to market-research firm IDC, ByteDance’s Volcengine holds more than 40% of Chinese mainland’s Model-as-a-Service market, followed by Alibaba Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud. Tencent Cloud did not rank among the top six providers.

Tong said Tencent Cloud is working to secure more computing power to support its fast-growing MaaS business.

Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub platform, which combines Hunyuan with several major third-party models, has seen token consumption double month-on-month since its March launch. Daily consumption now exceeds 5 trillion tokens, Tong said.

He said he expects more domestic computing capacity to become available in the second half of the year, supporting Tencent Cloud’s inference services.

Tencent shares closed Friday down 1.3% at HK$453, giving the company a market capitalization of about HK$4.1 trillion.

Contact editor Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com)