Alibaba Takes Major Step to Link Shopping to Main AI App
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. plans to link its flagship online shopping and travel services to its AI app, taking its biggest step yet to build Qwen into its one-stop artificial intelligence platform for consumers.China’s online retail leader aims to connect Taobao, Alipay, travel service Fliggy and Amap to the Qwen app starting Thursday. The idea is to eventually help Qwen’s 100 million users shop, book travel and pay for services via a single platform with the help of AI. The newly integrated functions are now available for public testing in China. The ambitious undertaking underscores how companies from Amazon.com Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc. are exploring agentic AI, where artificial intelligence helps people perform actual tasks. Companies like Alibaba and Tencent Holdings Ltd., 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 dollars flowing into Nvidia-powered data centres around the world, given persistent uncertainty about demand for AI services in future. Alibaba’s shares fell as much as 3.5 percent in Hong Kong, after rising nearly 20 percent over the past four trading days. “This dip is simply profit-taking, a textbook ‘sell the fact’ after the rally, not a verdict on Qwen app’s latest update,” said Steven Leung, executive director at UOB Kay Hian Hong Kong.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. On Thursday, executives demonstrated how the new Qwen features work. They walked through tasks such as ordering milk tea deliveries from a local store, buying a suitable robot vacuum cleaner for a home with a cat, and booking flights and hotels for a family vacation trip to Hainan. Initial tests showed that the app was able to perform basic tasks such as recommending a non-sugary tea, and users can directly pay for food delivery within the app. But it couldn’t for instance generate product links when responding to a prompt to buy a hiking sweater, suggesting Qwen has yet to fully integrate all shopping categories.Alibaba’s move to wire its suite of e-commerce, navigation and travel apps into Qwen highlights why peers such as Meituan and JD.com have expanded into quick commerce, food deliveries and logistics: agentic shopping requires a full execution stack, not standalone retail. Amazon, Google OpenAI and Microsoft are also making similar pushes toward agentic shopping and checkout flows. We believe Alibaba can drive this new form of engagement at lower incremental investment than these Chinese and global tech peers.“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 $53 billion toward infrastructure and AI development — an outlay he’s said the company could surpass over time.While US apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are not available in China, Alibaba faces stiff competition from domestic rivals including ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao, by some measures the most popular with about 172 million monthly active users as of the end of September, according to QuestMobile.Alibaba is set to extend its lead over Tencent and Baidu as China’s leading supplier of open-source AI models, as downloads on its Qwen family exceeded 700 million on Hugging Face in early January, according to AIBase. However, Alibaba is unlikely to profit meaningfully from this success given its effective subsidization of China’s national AI rollout. Quarterly adjusted Ebita in Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence business rose by just $132 million during the 12 months through September 2025.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.By Luz DingLearn more:AI’s Transformation of Online Shopping Is Just Getting StartedA rapidly growing share of consumers is using AI to find and buy products. Brands need to be ready, says the BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026.
