Alibaba’s Qwen tops 120 million orders in 6 days amid China’s AI shopping battle

Chinese consumers placed over 120 million orders on Alibaba Cloud’s flagship artificial intelligence app Qwen within six days, signalling growing acceptance of AI-powered shopping as the company joined other mainland Chinese tech giants in a multibillion-yuan holiday campaign.

Nearly half the orders came from residents in counties and hinterland areas, with around 1.56 million people aged 60 and above making their first online purchases through Qwen, according to a statement on Thursday from Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The milestone followed Alibaba’s Lunar New Year campaign launched on February 6, in which it looks to distribute 3 billion yuan (US$431 million) in incentives through Qwen. Other Chinese tech giants like Tencent Holdings and Baidu are also competing to attract users to their flagship AI apps in a so-called red packet war ahead of the Spring Festival.

The combination of “AI, social currency [money] and payment elements” during the red packet blitz was poised to ignite the “most frenzied user growth in the history of China’s mobile internet”, internet data service QuestMobile said on its WeChat account.

The Spring Festival had become a pivotal battleground for tech giants, which were scrambling to build their apps into gateways for the AI era, QuestMobile said.

Lunar New Year decorations for sale in Xiayi county, Henan province. Nearly half of the 120 million orders placed on Qwen came from residents in counties and hinterland areas. Photo: Xinhua

Alibaba said its campaign had triggered “a behavioural shift towards AI-powered shopping”, which it expected to increasingly become a lifestyle choice.

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