Alibaba's Qianwen Steps Up AI Feature Rollouts; Industry Sees Gemini Milestone & Open-Source Shifts

Alibaba's AI assistant Qianwen has been making rapid moves lately, rolling out new features and expanding its ecosystem to stay competitive in the crowded AI space.

On August 7, Qianwen launched several new capabilities including thinking research, scheduled tasks, office assistant, voice calls, and an agent plaza. The office assistant stands out with its ability to operate computers and browsers, call skills, and deliver documents like PPTs, Word files, and Excel sheets. The agent plaza integrates more daily life services into the platform.

Three days later, on August 10, Qianwen unveiled its open platform, with third-party services such as SF Express, Ziru, and Hello Car Rental gradually joining. The same day, its pricing scheme was revealed: professional memberships for the office assistant are tiered, with monthly subscription prices ranging from 19 to 128 yuan. Video generation is a separate service with five tiers based on usage quotas.

Beyond consumer-facing features, Alibaba's enterprise-level Agent product "QwenWork" entered public beta on August 3. Integrated from QoderWork, MuleRun, and Wukong, it's the first industry product supporting desktop, cloud, and enterprise collaboration Agents. Currently, it has initially connected to DingTalk IM, with plans to fully integrate enterprise databases and workflows in the future.

QuestMobile data sheds light on Qianwen's urgency: in November last year, it ranked sixth in monthly active users (MAU) among AI native apps. By March this year, its MAU reached 166 million, jumping to second place. However, growth slowed to 167 million in June, while Doubao (the top player) hit 382 million MAUs. This stagnation pushes Qianwen to find new growth drivers, shifting from a question-answering tool to an action-oriented AI application.

Other industry updates include Google's Gemini hitting 100 million MAUs, making it the fastest-growing product in Google's history—matching ChatGPT's milestone. Nvidia also launched its first open-source AI model, aligning with the industry's open-source trend. Meanwhile, Apple's payment business head announced retirement.

AI celebrity commercialization faced a setback when Tmall released a Qixi Festival ad featuring Duan Yan, an AI short drama star. Voice actor Sanshi publicly accused the ad of using an AI voice highly similar to his without permission, sparking debates on digital asset ownership and infringement.

Sources

• AIX Finance via TMTPost
• New Position Pro via TMTPost
• Lingtong Society's Global Tech & Economy Briefing (August 13, 2026)
• Times Finance
• Mouyu via TMTPost