Tencent Shifts AI Strategy to Enterprise as WorkBuddy Agent Reaches 32M Users

Tencent is shifting its AI strategy from consumer chatbots to enterprise tools, focusing on its WorkBuddy agent which serves 32M monthly users and is used by half of China's top 500 companies. The pivot follows criticism from founder Pony Ma and comes under the leadership of Cloud CEO Dowson Tong, who aims to compete with ByteDance, Alibaba, and DeepSeek. Tencent plans to release its full Hy4 model and a lower-cost Hy4 Flash version to enhance reasoning and visual understanding capabilities.