BEIJING — Alibaba is making a serious play for the consumer AI market with the launch of a significantly upgraded chatbot, marking a notable shift in strategy for the Chinese tech giant that’s been focused more on enterprise customers until now.
The new free app, built on the latest version of Alibaba’s Qwen large language model, went live in China on Monday as both a mobile app and website. An international version is coming later, according to the company.
Alibaba is pitching Qwen App as “the best personal AI assistant with the most powerful model,” and it’s now in public beta testing. The company says the app can generate full research reports and create polished, multi-slide PowerPoint presentations in seconds with just a single command.
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Playing Catch-Up
Here’s the thing: Alibaba has been behind in the consumer AI race for a while now. The company was actually one of the first in China to release a consumer AI assistant—back in late 2023 with an app called Tongyi—but it never really took off.
The numbers tell the story. As of September, Tongyi had just 6.96 million monthly active users, according to AI product tracker Aicpb.com. Compare that to market leader ByteDance’s Doubao, which had 150 million users. DeepSeek had 73.4 million, and Tencent followed with 64.2 million. Alibaba wasn’t even close.
Instead of doubling down on consumer apps, Alibaba has focused mainly on enterprise customers through its cloud services. That’s been the core of its AI strategy—selling tools to businesses rather than building apps for everyday users.
Why the Change Now?
This launch represents a real strategic pivot. Alibaba is now putting significant resources into consumer AI in a way it hasn’t before. The Qwen app is essentially a rebranded and massively upgraded version of Tongyi, with Alibaba also running AI assistant services in its Quark browser.
Part of what’s driving this shift is the brutal competition in China’s domestic AI market. DeepSeek kicked off a price war by prioritizing low-cost AI computing and app development, and everyone else has been forced to follow. When one company starts slashing prices and improving accessibility, the others have to respond or risk getting left behind.
Alibaba clearly decided it couldn’t afford to sit on the sidelines anymore while competitors grabbed market share in the consumer space.
What Qwen Can Actually Do
According to Alibaba, Qwen can handle tasks like generating research reports and building presentation decks quickly. Those are practical use cases that could appeal to students, professionals, and anyone who needs to pull together information fast.
Whether it can compete with Doubao, DeepSeek, and Tencent’s offerings remains to be seen. Those apps already have massive user bases and the momentum that comes with being established players. Alibaba is coming from behind, which means it’ll need to offer something genuinely better—or at least different enough—to pull users away from what they’re already using.
The International Play
Alibaba says an international version of Qwen is coming, though there’s no timeline yet. That could be significant given the company’s global ambitions, especially if it can differentiate itself in markets where Chinese AI apps haven’t gained much traction yet.
For now, though, the immediate battle is at home. Alibaba needs to prove it can compete in China’s crowded consumer AI market before it worries too much about expanding elsewhere. With Qwen, the company is at least showing it’s ready to fight for that space in a way it hasn’t before.