Alibaba takes major step to link Taobao shopping to main AI app

Alibaba Group Holding plans to link its flagship online shopping and travel services to its artificial intelligence (AI) app, taking its biggest step yet to build Qwen into its one-stop AI platform for consumers.

China’s online retail leader aims to connect Taobao, Alipay, travel service Fliggy and Amap to the Qwen app starting on Thursday (Jan 15). The idea is to eventually help Qwen’s 100 million users to shop, book travel and pay for services via a single platform with the help of AI, the company said. The newly integrated functions are now available for public testing in China.

The ambitious undertaking underscores how companies from Amazon.com to Meta Platforms are exploring agentic AI, where AI helps people perform actual tasks. Companies such as Alibaba and Tencent Holdings, which already operate “super apps” with hundreds of different services, are considered to have an initial advantage in that sphere.

Alibaba, which also operates a Netflix-like streaming service and one of China’s biggest meal delivery platforms, launched Qwen in November as a major step into consumer-facing AI services. It plans to build Qwen into an all-around personal assistant by gradually integrating individual services under the Alibaba umbrella. The company also launched an invite-only “task assistant” feature designed to conduct more complicated tasks, such as making phone calls to restaurants or building web applications.

In doing so, it’s seeking to answer global concerns about the money-making potential of AI. Investors are worried in particular about the hundreds of billions of US dollars flowing into Nvidia-powered data centres around the world, given persistent uncertainty about demand for AI services in future.

Alibaba is emphasising the extent of its ambition by hooking Qwen up with Taobao: the service that launched the company into e-commerce decades ago and remains its main Chinese shopping showcase.

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On Thursday, executives will demonstrate how the new Qwen features work. They plan to walk users through detailed tasks such as ordering bubble tea from a local store, buying and paying for stuff on Taobao and confirming restaurant or hotel reservations.

“AI is evolving from intelligence to agency,” said Wu Jia, an Alibaba vice-president. “What we are launching today represents a shift from models that understand to systems that act, deeply connected to real-world services.”

Alibaba has been among the most aggressive investors in and advocates for AI since DeepSeek fired up the local tech industry. Chief executive officer Eddie Wu has pledged more than US$53 billion for infrastructure and AI development, an outlay he’s said the company could surpass over time.

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While US apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are not available in China, it faces stiff competition from domestic rivals, including ByteDance’s Doubao, by some measures the most popular, with about 172 million monthly active users as at the end of September, according to QuestMobile.

Still, investors have largely endorsed Alibaba’s broader endeavours in AI, judging by the stock.

The shares have more than doubled since the start of 2025. Alibaba’s ability to control costs around consumer services while investing in cloud operations is something investors will monitor over the longer term. BLOOMBERG

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