Tencent's office ecosystem has started to revolve around WorkBuddy
On October 14, WorkBuddy was added to the contact list of WeChat Work.
In the newly released joint version, employees can assign tasks to this AI agent just like sending messages to colleagues. After being authorized by the enterprise, it can access relevant work materials such as messages, documents and meetings, and send the results back to WeChat Work after completing the tasks.
Fifteen days later, Tencent connected WorkBuddy to more of its office products.
On October 29, at the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, Tencent officially launched the cross-application AI collaboration system Buddy One, which connects the account and collaboration capabilities of office products including Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, ima and Tencent Cloud Drive. Among them, Tencent Docs, ima and Tencent Cloud Drive will be connected to the Agent technology base of WorkBuddy to share its task execution capabilities.
Office products that previously undertook meeting communication, document editing and knowledge management respectively have begun to share the same set of Agent execution capabilities.
This change may even affect whether some office software needs to exist independently in the future.
Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industries Group, told media including All-Weather Tech that if users gradually stop using the independent version of Tencent Meeting in the future and get used to completing meeting-related work in WorkBuddy, Tencent may reconsider whether it is necessary to maintain an independent client at that time.
Of course, this is only an assumption. Dowson Tong also emphasized that the usage habits that users have formed in the short term are difficult to change, and Tencent will not deliberately ask users to switch to another product.
But Tencent has already started to adjust the division of labor among its office products.
This round of adjustments came after the rapid growth of WorkBuddy usage. Since its launch in March this year, WorkBuddy has cumulatively completed 9 billion user task requests, with Token consumption 50 times higher than that in the initial stage of launch. The enterprise version has been deployed in more than 50 industries, covering 50% of China's top 500 enterprises and 60% of the top 100 enterprises in China.
As WorkBuddy gradually becomes the core of Tencent's AI office system, what Tencent needs to handle is no longer just how its own products collaborate.
On the one hand, even Tencent's internal office products still have data and permission boundaries, while external enterprises are more cautious about opening their core databases.
On the other hand, the rapidly growing Token consumption and increasingly fierce market competition also put WorkBuddy to the test of commercialization.
When Tencent further opens up its capabilities to third-party Agents and developers, how the original office products participate in commercialization and how ecological partners share revenues will also become new issues to be solved in this round of integration.
Connect Its Own Products First
Tencent is not short of office software.
Tencent has independent products in the fields of meetings, documents, knowledge management, enterprise communication and cloud storage, and some products have accumulated a huge user base.
However, even if they all belong to Tencent, users may still need to upload materials repeatedly, organize files, and re-explain the work background to the AI when switching between different applications.
The newly released Buddy One first connects the account and material retrieval capabilities between these products.
After users bind their Buddy One ID for free, they can retrieve authorized Tencent Docs, meeting records and ima knowledge base content through WorkBuddy, and generate answers with attached information sources.
Tencent has also unified the AI point system of some office products. The original WorkBuddy points have been upgraded to Buddy One points, which can be used universally among WorkBuddy, Tencent Docs, ima and Tencent Cloud Drive.
Deeper adjustments have taken place in the technology base.
According to the plan announced by Tencent, products such as Tencent Docs, Tencent Cloud Drive and ima will connect to the WorkBuddy Agent base, and call WorkBuddy's Harness capabilities in their respective applications.
The simultaneously released Tencent Cloud Drive is responsible for providing unified storage for different applications and Agents, so that the previously accumulated work materials and task results can continue to be used in subsequent work.
Dowson Tong explained that in the past decades, office collaboration has mainly revolved around files. Users use different editors to make documents, PPTs and reports, then hand them over to others for modification, and pass different versions back and forth.
As AI gradually takes on content generation work, this set of collaboration methods will also change.
In his view, the past mode of repeatedly modifying and transmitting around files will be "completely redesigned" in the AI era.
According to Tencent's vision, in the future, users can directly put forward demands to WorkBuddy, and the Agent will call corresponding tools to complete the tasks, while Tencent Docs, meetings, cloud drives and design products will continue to provide their respective professional capabilities.
But to make WorkBuddy truly undertake these tasks, simply connecting accounts and technology bases is not enough.
On the one hand, there are still data access boundaries between different products inside Tencent.
WeChat Work is a case in point.
The joint version launched on October 14 has allowed WorkBuddy to call part of WeChat Work's work information within the authorized scope. But this does not mean that it can directly read all chat records.
At present, WeChat Work has an independent chat record Agent to protect user privacy and prevent WorkBuddy from directly accessing other employees' chat content.
Only with full authorization can the WeChat Work Agent exchange information with WorkBuddy.
In other words, even within Tencent, connecting different products to the same Agent system does not mean that WorkBuddy can freely obtain all work contexts.
On the other hand, enterprise customers are more cautious about opening their core business systems.
Previously, All-Weather Tech visited the tissue paper enterprise Zhongshun Jierou and found that although WorkBuddy has been widely used inside the enterprise, with nearly 1,300 accounts opened as of October 10, the enterprise has not yet opened its core database to it.
Zhongshun Jierou has specially established an independent data environment, only allowing WorkBuddy to access screened data, and setting different permissions according to employee identities.
Although WorkBuddy has gradually become an important workbench for Tencent's AI office ecosystem, it still faces two walls: the information boundary between different products inside Tencent, and the access restrictions of external enterprises on core business data.
At present, the cross-product capabilities that Buddy One has achieved are mainly concentrated in account interconnection, authorized material retrieval, point sharing and unified storage, and further cross-application memory sharing is still in progress.
Tencent's rich office products and enterprise customer base provide WorkBuddy with a large number of potential context sources. But to what extent these scattered information can be effectively called by the Agent is still the unfinished work of this integration.
Rearrange the Charging Method
As office products are gradually integrated around WorkBuddy, Tencent has also begun to rearrange the charging method.
This time, Tencent launched the Buddy One VIP personal membership package with a continuous monthly subscription price of 700 yuan.
This package also provides rights and interests such as the Personal Flagship Edition of WorkBuddy, the Professional Edition of Tencent Meeting, and the Super Member Plus of Tencent Docs, including 50,000 general AI points and 1TB shared storage space per month.
It is worth noting that the previous continuous monthly subscription price of the Personal Flagship Edition of WorkBuddy was also 700 yuan. The change of Buddy One this time mainly lies in integrating the membership rights and interests that originally belonged to different office products into the same subscription system.
But for the enterprise market, Tencent still faces commercialization pressure.
Dowson Tong told media including All-Weather Tech that Tencent has not yet put forward a clear revenue target for the WorkBuddy team, and considers commercialization more from the perspective of supporting product and service development.
As the number of WorkBuddy task requests continues to grow, model calls and computing power consumption also increase accordingly.
According to the billing rules of Tencent Cloud, WorkBuddy point consumption is jointly determined by the model type, Token usage and task complexity. The more tasks users perform and the more complex the models they use, the higher the related resource consumption usually is.
For Tencent, the rapidly growing usage means greater market opportunities, but it also requires continuous investment in computing power resources.
At present, Tencent has begun to generate revenue through the security, observability and management capabilities of the enterprise version.
According to the prices on the official website of Tencent Cloud, the WorkBuddy Enterprise Flagship Edition is priced at 198 yuan per person per month, including 2,000 points per person per month; the Enterprise Exclusive Edition is priced at 316 yuan per person per month.
This price is also constrained by competitors. The monthly team subscription price of Lark's Doubao Work Partner is also 198 yuan per seat. DingTalk launched four AI commercial versions in September this year, incorporating Qianwen Office into the rights and interests of different versions, and giving corresponding points according to the number of employees purchased by the enterprise.
The functions and point consumption rules of different products are not completely consistent, but office Agents are gradually becoming part of enterprise collaboration software packages.
This means that Tencent needs to prove that the task execution capabilities and enterprise-level services provided by WorkBuddy can support its independent charging.
Whether enterprise customers are willing to pay continuously also depends on the actual input-output ratio.
For example, Suning.com analyzes task execution trajectories through the WorkBuddy observability center, adjusts prompts, models and tool configurations, reducing Token consumption by 10%; H3C employees have 1.3 million conversations with WorkBuddy every day, and the management team has begun to adjust Token allocation and incentive strategies according to usage.
From these cases, we can see that with the popularization of Agents in enterprises, enterprises have begun to manage the use of AI resources in a refined way.
But controlling Token consumption is two different things from how much operating revenue the Agent can ultimately create for the enterprise.
For WorkBuddy, future revenue sources may not be limited to software subscriptions, but also include enterprise-level management capabilities, system deployment, and professional services provided by ecological partners.
But Tencent still needs to prove that these revenues can support the ever-growing computing power consumption and service costs.
How Far Can It Go
Tencent's office integration is not limited to its own products.
At this conference, Dowson Tong also announced that WorkBuddy will fully open its product architecture to support self-developed Agents of enterprises, third-party Agents and third-party instant messaging systems to access.
He said that enterprises can independently choose models, Agents and instant messaging tools.
At present, WorkBuddy has accessed overseas collaboration tools such as Slack and Telegram. Even if enterprises do not fully use Tencent's office software, they can call WorkBuddy in their original systems.
These actions also make the future product form of WorkBuddy gradually clear.
For individual users, it is becoming a unified AI workbench. Products such as Tencent Docs, meetings and cloud drives still retain their independent forms, but they also begin to provide callable professional capabilities for WorkBuddy.
For enterprises, WorkBuddy may further become the "enterprise intelligent hub" as mentioned by Dowson Tong.
Enterprises can access self-developed Agents, third-party Agents and internal business systems in WorkBuddy, organize the originally scattered agents to form an Agent network that can execute tasks across systems.
On the developer side, Tencent has begun to build a skill distribution and transaction system.
At present, the WorkBuddy Open Platform has gathered more than 50,000 partners and developers, with more than 200,000 Skills listed.
Among them, SkillHub undertakes functions such as skill listing and distribution. SkillPay, launched in July this year, further connects the skill call and payment links, allowing developers and enterprises to encapsulate professional capabilities into Pay Skills that are charged per use.
In this system, WorkBuddy is not only an entry for users to call skills, but also has the opportunity to become a transaction channel connecting developers, enterprise customers and third-party services.
But when more and more products provide services through Agents, the original user relationship and commercial interests may also change.
Similar problems have begun to appear in Tencent Maps.
The map capabilities of Tencent Maps are being opened to other Agents through MCP, Skills and other methods.
As for the future business model, Zhong Xiangping, Vice President of Tencent Group and President of Tencent Smart Mobility, admitted to media including All-Weather Tech that in addition to the original interface call charges, forms such as traffic commission and pay-for-performance may also appear, but the specific model has not been determined yet.
This problem may also arise in the cooperation between WorkBuddy and other office products and third-party services. When users increasingly complete their work through WorkBuddy, what capabilities the original products provide, how many independent entrances to retain, and how to participate in commercialization may all need to be rearranged.
At the same time, the competition of domestic office Agents is still heating up. Lark has developed multi-Agent capabilities within its original collaboration platform, and manufacturers such as ByteDance, Alibaba and Baidu are also continuing to expand related products.
Dowson Tong did not rush to a conclusion about WorkBuddy's current market position.
He confessed that WorkBuddy is indeed in a "relatively leading position" at present, but this track has just started, and products will still need continuous iteration in the next few years, while other manufacturers are also catching up.
From unifying the personal office entry, to connecting the Agent network inside the enterprise, and then attracting developers to provide professional capabilities through SkillHub and SkillPay, WorkBuddy is extending to a more complete Agent ecosystem.
However, the development of these three levels is not synchronized.
For individual users, Tencent has begun to integrate its office products; for enterprises, the access of core business systems is still restricted by data and permission boundaries; for developers, although the skill distribution and charging mechanism has been established, whether it can form a sustained transaction scale remains to be seen.
Tencent has built a framework for WorkBuddy to connect products, enterprises and developers.
Next, what determines how far this ecosystem can go is not only how many tools WorkBuddy can call, but also how much business enterprises are willing to open to it, and whether the products and developers that provide capabilities can get continuous returns from it.
This article is from the WeChat official account "All-Weather Tech" (ID: iawtmt), written by All-Weather Tech, and published with authorization from 36Kr.