"Take over" SalesEase, Tencent AI to B needs to take a step forward | Zhiyong Analysis

Written by Deng Yongyi

Edited by Su Jianxun

At the beginning of the year, a significant piece of news in the enterprise service field has been quietly settled.

On February 14, Tencent announced that the cooperative relationship between Tencent and CRM company Salesforce "has been upgraded again". Li Qiang, Vice President of Tencent Group and President of the Government and Enterprise Business, will also serve as the Chairman of Salesforce. The founder, Shi Yanze, will continue to serve as CEO, and Salesforce will maintain an independent development status.

A few days before the official announcement, this news had already spread. A more common saying is that "Tencent officially takes over Salesforce", and it is rumored that Tencent's share in Salesforce exceeds 53%, making it the de facto major shareholder.

Tencent's statement is more restrained. However, it is obvious that Tencent's leading role in the cooperation will be greatly enhanced; as the leading CRM company in China, Salesforce will be more deeply integrated into the Tencent system.

Tencent is an old shareholder of Salesforce, and their cooperation can be traced back to the 280 million yuan financing for Salesforce's Round D in 2017. Since then, Tencent has exclusively invested in the D+ and E rounds of financing for two consecutive years.

Now, the giant has taken another step forward, which is meaningful for the SaaS field that is still in the cold winter.

In the past few years, the main theme of the cloud industry has been to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Cloud vendors are eliminating unprofitable projects, whether they are self-developed or externally invested.

A former Tencent employee told "Intelligent Emergence" that since 2022, Tencent CSIG has begun to review the To B startups it has invested in, and the loss-making investment projects should be withdrawn as much as possible.

However, after the wave of large models, the situation has changed.

The giants are not willing to be just infrastructure service providers but have begun to increase their investment in applications. For example, in the past two years, Tencent has built a full-link AI large model product matrix, with more than 700 internal landing applications.

The SaaS Proxy War Enters a New Stage

In the CRM track, Tencent has already deployed multiple products within the system, including "Tencent Qidian" within the CSIG (Cloud and Smart Industries Group) system.

A primary question is whether Salesforce will merge with Tencent Qidian in the future and to what extent?

A person close to Tencent Qidian told "Intelligent Emergence" that currently, the teams of both sides have not seen obvious integration. Both sides have two independent teams in terms of product research and development and marketing.

Judging from the products alone, Tencent Qidian and Salesforce are more complementary rather than substitutive.

The CRM field is a broad concept with many product types. "Tencent Qidian", launched in 2015, focuses on service-oriented CRM, and is more involved in the management of the enterprise customer service side, providing components such as customer service, call center, marketing, Enterprise QQ 2.0, and application market.

While Salesforce is more comparable to Salesforce, starting from SFA (Sales Force Automation), it is strong in the management of the sales process, including customer information management, sales opportunity tracking, sales forecasting, and order management.

The combination of the two can be said to have opened up the entire process from the front-end sales to the back-end service.

The leading startups in the CRM track have generally completed the first stage of market coverage - in 2024, the number of customers announced by Salesforce has exceeded 5,000, covering the mainstream medium and large customers in China. For Salesforce, being integrated into the Tencent system is also conducive to breaking through the growth bottleneck and finding new user opportunities.

Tencent Qidian was born within the Tencent system and is particularly suitable for enterprises that hope to use Tencent resources for customer management and marketing promotion, such as e-commerce, education, finance, media, manufacturing, etc., focusing on customer interaction through WeChat, QQ, and other methods; while Salesforce has more rich experience in large enterprises and complex business processes, and has advantages in government and enterprise customers in energy, industry, etc.

The cooperation between Tencent and Salesforce also means that the giant proxy war in the To B industry has entered a new stage.

There are precedents for such combinations. In August 2022, Salesforce chose to give up its self-operated business in the Chinese region and instead chose to reach an exclusive cooperation with Alibaba. Alibaba Cloud became the exclusive Chinese agent of Salesforce. Alibaba Cloud even specially established a center in Guangzhou to be responsible for the localization and delivery of the products.

Strengthening the bond with the giants also stems from the fact that the days of Chinese SaaS enterprises have not been easy in recent years.

The domestic SaaS industry emerged after 2010, and the first wave of investment boom began in 2015, reaching its peak around 2021. But soon, the US stock market SaaS market cooled down around 2022, and the exit and investment opportunities of Chinese SaaS companies dropped sharply, and they all came to a fork in the road: either generate their own blood or merge and acquire.

One example is Beisen Holdings, the leading HR SaaS. Before going public in 2023, Beisen experienced many twists and turns, and after going public, the stock price dropped by 80%. In 2025, Beisen acquired the SaaS manufacturer "Cool College" in the training track for 180 million yuan, also aiming to seek business breakthroughs, and the latter's valuation at its peak exceeded 1 billion yuan.

In the AI Era, Giants Are Eager to "Take a Step Forward"

The giants' deepening of the connection with their partners is somewhat similar to the state when the To B market was emerging many years ago: taking a step forward in the application side.

In fact, the enterprise service market has entered a new stage. From the underlying IaaS (cloud services) to PaaS (platform layer), whether it is Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, ByteDance and other giants, the homogeneity level of each company's services is already very high, and the product types are very similar.

The remaining battlefield is the SaaS layer (application). Whether it is a new To C application or the previous To B investment cooperation, it also has a new era significance.

The narrative of the To B industry has shifted to AI - for this new thing, the large model, Tencent urgently needs a stronger grip in the application layer to increase the touchpoints with customers in order to establish a user mindset in the new market.

In the past year, Tencent has repeatedly emphasized the goal of practicality and wants to "build an AI closest to the industry". In the past year, Tencent Cloud has united with 11,000 ecological partners, and the revenue contributed by partners accounts for one-third of Tencent Cloud's overall revenue, which is also a high number among cloud vendors.

After the explosion of large models, the market generally believes that commercialization opportunities will be seen in To B first. Among the major factories, Tencent can be said to be the manufacturer that most firmly shouts "Do To B first" and "Serve its own ecosystem first".

In June 2023, when Tencent first disclosed the progress of the large model, it first told the To B story and launched dozens of industry large models in one go; in To C, it has always maintained a cautious attitude. Tencent's ChatGPT-like assistant Yuanbao was launched in May 2024, and it was not until recently that multiple products such as WeChat quickly integrated DeepSeek - that the market really saw Tencent increase its investment.

In an interview with "Caijing" magazine in 2024, Salesforce CEO Shi Yanze did not deny the difficulties encountered in the current industry. He once described that the current Chinese SaaS track is in the "darkness before dawn".

Whether for large factories or SaaS manufacturers, deepening cooperation rather than going it alone may be the most reasonable solution at present.

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This article is from the WeChat public account "Intelligent Emergence", author: Deng Yongyi, and 36Kr is authorized to publish it.