Tencent elevates its AI strategy with WorkBuddy, a multi-agent platform built for real-world business applications, emphasising privacy and local processing as it gains traction across industries in China and Hong Kong.
Tencent is pitching WorkBuddy as more than another chatbot. The company says the product is built to take instructions in plain language, break work into steps and return a finished output, whether that means researching a topic, analysing data or drafting documents. In an interview with Ming Pao, Tencent executive Cai Yihai said the group’s AI strategy has long focused on applying technology to solve practical customer problems rather than pursuing artificial intelligence for its own sake.
That approach reflects Tencent’s broader AI development history. Cai said the company’s earlier work, starting about a decade ago, centred on machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing, technologies now embedded in services such as speech-to-text conversion, translation and face recognition for remote bank account opening. He said Tencent does not judge progress by the size of a single model, but by a full-stack approach that combines computing power, models, platforms and applications.
WorkBuddy was launched in mainland China on March 9 and introduced in Hong Kong at the end of May. Ming Pao reported that the product has already drawn interest from banks, insurers, retailers, logistics firms, healthcare providers, transport operators, schools and public bodies. Tencent’s Hong Kong pricing puts individual users at about $10 a month and business users at about $40 a month. A report from Analysys on China’s office intelligent-agent market said WorkBuddy’s monthly visits on PC had exceeded 20 million.
Tencent Cloud says the product can handle tasks including document processing, data analysis and report preparation. It also runs locally on a user’s device, with explicit permission required before it accesses folders, a design the company says is intended to improve privacy and limit overreach. Tencent says WorkBuddy supports multiple agents working at the same time, more than 100 built-in skills and integration with tools such as Slack, Telegram and Discord, while also using a security architecture that confines agent activity to authorised boundaries. Tencent added that the service is part of a wider push to expand AI tools for both individuals and enterprises, including a new enterprise AI workspace and related developer platforms.
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