Less than half a year after its launch, is it Tencent's new trump card?

In January, it was nothing more than an idea. By March, it had evolved into a pilot side product supported by a team of just over a dozen people.

Today, its team has expanded to 100 members, and all six business groups of Tencent have given the green light to all matters related to it. The outside world has set even higher expectations for it, with many calling it Tencent's "new crown prince".

Tencent's previous "crown prince" was WeChat, which now boasts over 1.4 billion users.

Riding the Wind to Soar

In January 2026, Wang Shengjie, a product manager at Tencent Cloud, looked at CodeBuddy and came up with an idea.

CodeBuddy is Tencent's in-house AI programming tool whose core function is to generate code with AI, used by more than 90% of Tencent's engineers. Wang Shengjie wanted to test whether this set of AI capabilities could be expanded from writing code to generating reports, creating spreadsheets, and organizing files... so that most office workers could use AI to help with their work.

With three colleagues and one weekend, they built WorkBuddy.

On January 19, this very "draft-like" product that skipped the traditional project approval process was recorded in a 10+ minute demo video by Wang Shengjie, who sent it to his superior Liu Yi — Liu Yi made the decision that very night, and quickly pushed the whole company to launch internal beta testing.

Soon, non-technical positions such as HR, administration, and operations, which rarely participate in technical work, began to use it for data analysis, report sorting, and batch file processing, providing product feedback for the technical team.

In the following two months, more than 2,000 non-technical employees participated in the trial every day.

While Tencent was polishing WorkBuddy, a "lobster" — OpenClaw — became a hit in the tech and internet circles. It enables AI to operate computers like real people: opening webpages, downloading files, and sending emails, quickly going viral and capturing widespread attention. By March, "installing the lobster" had become one of the buzzwords across Chinese society.

The skyrocketing popularity of OpenClaw quickly led to a consensus in the industry: AI will accelerate its evolution from "being able to answer questions" to "being able to get things done".

Changes in the external environment no longer allowed Tencent to take its time polishing WorkBuddy.

On March 9, WorkBuddy, which had been in internal beta for less than two months, was officially released to the public. Coupled with QClaw, a similar product previously launched by the Tencent PC Manager team, Tencent rolled out two "lobster-like" products in just one month. The company, which was previously considered slow to respond to AI, suddenly picked up the pace drastically.

At the same time, ByteDance's Volcano Engine, Alibaba's Tongyi, and DingTalk also launched similar products. Domestic tech giants all entered the track, officially kicking off the "Lobster War".

Driven by the huge wave brought by the "lobster" trend, WorkBuddy quickly delivered impressive results. On the second day after its launch, the number of requests instantly multiplied several times that of CodeBuddy, triggering computing resource alerts, and the team was forced to urgently expand its capacity tenfold. On March 12, it was further directly connected to WeChat for public access — one week earlier than the originally scheduled release date.

A product that went through no project approval process and had no official launch ceremony was thus fully "endorsed" by the market with massive traffic.

Advancing at Full Speed

The growth curve of WorkBuddy after its launch brought Tencent a long-lost sense of growth that had not been seen since the early days of WeChat: in March alone, PC-side visits reached 8.85 million, and the figure exceeded 20.97 million by June, ranking first among similar products in China, surpassing the sum of the second and third place combined.

While the numbers are surging, the product's status within Tencent has also been upgraded simultaneously.

According to people close to Tencent, Ma Huateng almost never misses WorkBuddy's product meetings, and the team has expanded from the initial small-scale exploration to more than 100 people. In May, the WorkBuddy team moved from the Digital Mansion in Shenzhen to Tencent Building. The team was promoted to become the 6th Cloud Product Department of Tencent Cloud, and Liu Yi, the head of the department, was promoted from Director to Assistant General Manager.

The biggest benefit of the top leader personally getting involved is that the computing power, technology and market resource demands put forward by WorkBuddy from Tencent's six business groups are mostly approved quickly, a situation described internally as "all the way green lights".

Employees even began to privately call it the "new crown prince", and started discussing whether it could enter Tencent's highest honor for milestone products — the "Hall of Fame", just like QQ and WeChat Official Accounts.

In July, the signal became even clearer. The relevant business and part of the team of the QClaw Product Center under Tencent PC Manager were merged into the 6th Cloud Product Department where WorkBuddy is located. The result of the company's internal "horse race" competition is clear: WorkBuddy, rather than QClaw, has been established as the main line of the Group's office Agent business.

Up to now, WorkBuddy has been connected to Hunyuan Large Model, Tencent Docs, Tencent Cloud Drive, Tencent Le Xiang, ima, QQ Mail, Tencent Stock Picker, Tencent News... Finally, even WeChat Pay has achieved access. The user relationships that Tencent has accumulated over the past 20 years are all in the hands of WorkBuddy, which has been transformed into an exclusive moat that other companies can hardly replicate.

In the Q1 financial report, Ma Huateng personally wrote a sentence for it — "In terms of daily active users, it is the most widely used productivity AI agent service in China."

Moreover, different from its previous low-profile attitude, Tencent is almost making a big fanfare to scale up WorkBuddy.

Online, social media, web advertisements, and WeChat Moments are full of links to WorkBuddy, continuously demonstrating scenarios of generating reports, making PPTs, and processing Excel sheets.

Offline, its advertisements appear in elevators, on city streets, and even cover entire subway carriages in Shanghai and Shenzhen. According to media estimates, the offline placement cost in the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen alone is close to 100 million yuan.

In order to seize the user entry as soon as possible, WorkBuddy does not bind itself to the Hunyuan Large Model, but simultaneously accesses multiple models such as DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, and MiniMax, allowing users to freely switch according to their tasks and cost requirements — although this sacrifices the exclusivity of Hunyuan in the short term, it brings faster growth in user scale.

In addition, there are policies such as points for registration, invitation rewards, and free limited-time access to models, many of which are not Tencent's usual practices. Tencent is determined to push WorkBuddy forward non-stop. To this end, the WorkBuddy team is also working at full speed, and has even set a goal —

Iterate on a daily basis.

Competition Among All Players

While WorkBuddy is leading the pack, the overall market size of the office Agent track is also expanding rapidly.

A report released by iiMedia Research shows that the size of China's AI agent market reached 80.4 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 123.2%, and it is expected to reach 696.8 billion yuan by 2030.

The huge market has stimulated almost all internet tech giants to enter the track. Apart from Tencent, the companies that have invested the most are ByteDance and Alibaba.

ByteDance's path is to expand from developer tools to general office scenarios: TRAE, which focuses on programming, first upgraded its personal-oriented TRAE SOLO to TRAE Work. In July, it launched the largest organizational adjustment in recent years — merging the Feishu product team into Doubao, and the sales, marketing and GTM teams into the Volcano Engine system, trying to integrate the sales and delivery of MaaS and SaaS.

Alibaba's path is integration and consolidation: it unifies three independent Agent products — QoderWork incubated by the Tongyi Lingma team, "Wukong" incubated by DingTalk, and "MuleRun" developed by Alibaba Cloud's internal startup team, under the brand of "Tongyi", the most well-known brand, named Tongyi Office, and appointed Chen Yusen, the new CEO of DingTalk, to take charge of the business. The team relocation and integration were completed in just two months.

Baidu launched a professional office agent platform for individual and enterprise office scenarios — Baidu Dazi. Its core positioning is that after users put forward work goals, Baidu Dazi can complete task decomposition, data retrieval, file processing and tool invocation, and continuously handle complex tasks across applications and files.

In addition to the big tech giants, a number of professional software enterprises focusing on enterprise applications have also joined the competition one after another, and relying on their deep professional accumulation, they have formed unique advantages in promoting enterprise business decision-making and execution.

Yonyou, FanRuan and other leading enterprises that used to focus on the enterprise BI (Business Intelligence) field have also kept up with the AI trend and launched their own products. For example, Yonyou promptly upgraded its strategy from "enterprise software" to "enterprise AI", and built a three-in-one business architecture consisting of enterprise AI software (Yonyou BIP 6), enterprise AI hardware-software integrated products (Enterprise AI Box), and enterprise AI business operation services (AI BaaS).

Under FanRuan Software, which serves more than 43,000 large and medium-sized enterprises, Jian Daoyun and Wufan enable intelligence to evolve from supporting business to actively promoting business.

For example, if the system detects that a key customer has not been followed up for a long time, Jian Daoyun will first turn on the red light, presenting the customer file, historical records and responsible person; Wufan will then analyze the reason for the stagnation, generate follow-up suggestions, call the message or email tool to execute the action, and then write the result back to the customer file to trigger the next process or escalation. Throughout the whole process, AI will push the business forward on its own based on historical data.

With big tech companies and professional vendors all increasing their efforts in layout, the office Agent track is expanding rapidly. Data from Analysys, a third-party institution, shows that as of June 2026, there are 17 mainstream desktop-side AI-native office agents in China.

The competition in the entire market has therefore become even more fierce.

A Long Way to Go

As of July 2026, WorkBuddy has built in more than 340 "experts" covering operations, design, data, development, finance and other fields. Coupled with more than 10,000 skills included in the SkillHub marketplace, it forms a considerable capability pool.

Now, users only need to give a natural language instruction, and WorkBuddy can independently decompose the task, schedule different experts to handle the task in parallel, and run through the complete process from data collection, data analysis to report generation.

Moreover, it has a unique core advantage that distinguishes it from pure chat tools: the desktop client, mobile App, and WeChat Mini Program are fully interconnected, allowing users to remotely control their computers to complete tasks with a single WeChat message while commuting.

In terms of industry position, WorkBuddy still maintains an undisputed first place in the domestic desktop-side AI-native office agent market.

Moreover, Tencent is continuing to increase its investment:

According to Tencent's Q2 financial report, its capital expenditure in the current period soared to 52.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 176%. In addition, there is 51.4 billion yuan in prepaid computing power, and the cumulative capital expenditure in the first half of the year reached 84.7 billion yuan.

The unprecedented capital expenditure turned Tencent's free cash flow into negative 13.8 billion yuan, the first time in many years. Moreover, Tencent is still expanding its strategic reserves: in June, it issued USD 2.45 billion in dollar-denominated bonds and 15 billion yuan in RMB-denominated bonds, and its short-term borrowings jumped from 28.3 billion yuan to 70.6 billion yuan. Most of these funds will be invested in AI, and WorkBuddy is one of the key investment priorities.

At the earnings conference, Mitchell, Tencent's Chief Strategy Officer, laid out the priority of computing power allocation: the first is the training of Hunyuan Large Model; the second is the inference of WorkBuddy. Mitchell even explicitly stated: "After we saw the explosive growth of WorkBuddy, we significantly tilted funds to it, and cut the budget of other products in the AI product line at the same time."

The most important asset, however, is Tencent's huge user base and ecosystem.

As the model layer becomes more accessible, and DeepSeek and Qwen have brought the price of open-source models down to an extremely low level, technology is no longer a threshold, and scenarios and distribution have re-emerged as the key to competition — Tencent has WeChat, Games, WeCom, and Video Account, with the most extensive scenario coverage in China.

If in the future WeChat Agent is fully interconnected with WorkBuddy and WeCom — a user base of more than 1 billion, B-end and C-end Agent capabilities, cross-platform coverage... such a combination will become a unique existence across the country.

But whether WorkBuddy can truly live up to the important responsibility of the "crown prince" is only facing the beginning of its test.

A real "crown prince" must be truly profitable. There are already many stories about WorkBuddy: for example, an airport engineer handed over more than 300 pages of data files to WorkBuddy, which extracted, counted, mapped and made a PPT, finishing the work that was originally expected to take a week in just more than half a day. But it is still a long way to go before enterprises are truly willing to pay for WorkBuddy.

China's office software market has never been a "high-margin" track: basic functions have long been made free by fierce competition, and paid functions require even more intense competition. Even if employees enjoy using the product, it does not mean that it brings benefits to the enterprise. Only when it can truly allow enterprises to reduce headcount or expand business, and generate real financial returns for enterprises, will large-scale paid adoption arrive, and capital expenditure can be converted into returns.

Data shows that currently, the total monthly active users of domestic AI office desktop products are about 30 million. Even estimated based on the user scale of traditional office software, there is still about 20 times room for growth.

This further means that WorkBuddy has only had a very good start, and there is still a long way to go in the future.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Huashang Taolue" (ID: hstl8888), authored by Huashang Taolue, and authorized for release by 36Kr.