Alibaba expert envisions AI agents transforming daily life in 5 years

Digital colleagues will be a part of everyday life in the next five years, according to an artificial intelligence (AI) expert from Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit, who envisions an ecosystem of application developers creating AI agents to cater to consumer and business demands.

“Agentic AI is very popular in the industry right now,” said Huang Fei, vice-president of Alibaba Cloud and head of the company’s Tongyi Natural Language Processing Lab. Speaking at the China Conference 2025 organised by the Post on Tuesday, he was referring to systems that use AI to act autonomously on behalf of users to pursue goals or complete tasks.

The future AI landscape would be dominated by a small number of fundamental model providers and a larger number of developers producing such agents, Huang said.

His comments underscored Alibaba’s strategy of becoming a key provider of AI infrastructure and fundamental models. The company’s Qwen series of open-source large language models has become popular, and Alibaba has pledged at least US$53 billion over the next three years to invest in AI infrastructure. Alibaba owns the Post.

Hong Kong would be able to play a role in AI development thanks to its capital resources, research capabilities, access to mainland China, government support and legal framework, Huang said.

“Hong Kong has top-tier researchers and universities, alongside the Hong Kong government also providing a lot of support for innovation, alongside the city’s strong legal system,” he said. “It is able to provide not only the capital resources, but also the human resources and the carbon for AI development.”

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