Alibaba Group is rolling out a major upgrade to its Qwen chatbot, adding “agentic” artificial intelligence (AI) features that allow the assistant to conduct real-world tasks such as ordering food and booking travel across the company’s consumer services.
The Jan. 15 announcement deepens Qwen’s integration across Alibaba’s ecommerce, local services and travel platforms. It also sharpens the company’s push into consumer-facing AI as it competes with rivals ByteDance and Tencent.
Alibaba owns the world’s two largest online marketplaces by gross merchandise value (GMV), Taobao and Tmall.
Taobao ranks No. 1 in the Global Online Marketplaces Database, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest such marketplaces by GMV. Tmall ranks No. 2. Both platforms operate in China and primarily serve the Chinese market. Among Alibaba’s other marketplaces is the global B2B marketplace Alibaba.com.
Alibaba upgrades Qwen with agentic AI capabilities
Alibaba said the enhanced assistant can move beyond answering questions to acting on users’ behalf. It also said the assistant can complete multistep actions across multiple apps without requiring users to switch between services. A single prompt can trigger tasks such as finding a restaurant, placing an order, arranging delivery or planning and booking a trip within Alibaba’s ecosystem.
The upgrade reflects a broader shift in the technology sector toward agentic AI — systems designed to autonomously execute actions — rather than limiting chatbots to search, recommendations or conversational support. Chinese technology companies have accelerated efforts to embed AI assistants into daily consumer workflows, intensifying competition among platforms with large commerce and services footprints.
Alibaba has made AI a central pillar of its long-term strategy, with the Qwen family of models underpinning consumer applications, cloud services and developer tools. The latest update underscores a growing focus on using AI to drive everyday engagement and transactions across its platforms.
Alibaba did not disclose a timeline for the rollout of the new features or identify which additional services may be added to Qwen’s agentic capabilities.
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