Chinese consumers placed over 120 million orders on Alibaba Cloud’s flagship artificial intelligence (AI) app Qwen within six days, signaling growing acceptance of AI-powered shopping as Alibaba joined other Chinese tech companies in a multi-billion yuan holiday campaign. Nearly half the orders came from residents in counties and hinterland areas, with around 1.56 million people aged 60 and above making their first online purchases through Qwen, according to Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding. The milestone followed Alibaba’s Lunar New Year campaign launched on February 6, in which it aims to distribute CNY3 billion in incentives through Qwen. Tencent Holdings and Baidu are also competing to attract users to their flagship AI apps in a so-called red packet war ahead of the Spring Festival. The combination of “AI, social currency and payment elements” during the red packet blitz was poised to ignite the “most frenzied user growth in the history of China’s mobile internet”, internet data service QuestMobile said on its WeChat account.
The Spring Festival had become a pivotal battleground for tech giants, which were scrambling to build their apps into gateways for the AI era, QuestMobile said. Alibaba said its campaign had triggered “a behavioral shift towards AI-powered shopping”, which it expected to increasingly become a lifestyle choice. QuestMobile said the campaign was paying off for Big Tech companies as daily active users (DAU) of their AI apps surged. DAU for Tencent’s Yuanbao surged 212% on February 1, the first day of its marketing push to distribute CNY1 billion through the app, according to QuestMobile. Qwen’s DAU soared to about 58.5 million on the first day of its campaign on February 6, a 727% increase from some 7 million the day before. Qwen also surged past Yuanbao to the top of China’s Apple App Store hours after its campaign began, and remained in first place from February 6 to 11, according to the App Store rankings.
The Qwen campaign is also benefiting other services in Alibaba’s ecosystem. Alipay, the payment service of Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, said it had processed more than 120 million “AI payments” in the past week, making it the first AI-native payment service to cross that milestone. The AI payment service has been linked to the Qwen app since January. Alibaba announced earlier that it was connecting Qwen to its wider ecosystem, including online shopping and on-demand delivery services Taobao and Shangou, travel booking and ticketing platforms Fliggy and Damai, as well as Alipay. Analysts earlier said Alibaba’s Spring Festival campaign was achieving two goals – attracting new users to Qwen while driving growth for its e-commerce and on-demand delivery businesses, the South China Morning Post reports.
