Alibaba Group has linked its flagship online shopping and travel services to its AI app, taking its biggest step yet to build Qwen into its one-stop artificial intelligence platform for consumers.
China’s online retail leader connected Taobao, Alipay, travel service Fliggy and Amap to the Qwen app starting Thursday. The idea is to eventually help Qwen’s 100 million users to shop, book travel and pay for services via a single platform with the help of AI, the company said in a statement. The newly integrated functions are now available in China.
The ambitious undertaking underscores how companies from Amazon.com to Meta Platforms are exploring agentic AI, where artificial intelligence helps people perform actual tasks. Companies like Alibaba and Tencent Holdings, which already operate “super apps” with hundreds of different services, are considered to have an initial advantage in that sphere.
Alibaba, which also operates a Netflix-like streaming service and one of China’s biggest meal delivery platforms, launched Qwen in November as a major step into consumer-facing AI services. It plans to build Qwen into an all-around personal assistant by gradually integrating individual services under the Alibaba umbrella. The company also launched an invite-only “task assistant” feature designed to conduct more complicated tasks, such as making phone calls to restaurants or building web applications.
In doing so, it’s seeking to answer global concerns about the money-making potential of AI. Investors are worried in particular about the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into Nvidia-powered datacenters around the world, given persistent uncertainty about demand for AI services in future.
