In China, the race for chatbot dominance looks less like a technical arms race and more like a battle for daily habits. Rather than touting cutting-edge models alone, many Chinese companies are spending big to get people to use their AI assistants for real-world tasks — often by handing out freebies.
Nineteen-year-old delivery driver Li Hao is a small example of how this plays out. He usually uses ByteDance’s Doubao, but during the Lunar New Year he tried Alibaba’s Qwen because the company offered a free milk tea for orders placed through the chatbot. He enjoyed the drink but didn’t stick with Qwen afterward.
That mix of aggressive promotion and short-term trial is exactly what leading firms want: to teach users that chatbots can do more than answer questions, they can complete purchases. Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and newcomers such as Moonshot AI and DeepSeek are pushing chatbots into everyday commerce — from ordering drinks to buying plane tickets — and integrating them tightly with payments and delivery. With Qwen, for example, typing “I want to order a milk tea” can surface nearby options, allow customization and finish payment inside the app. For Alipay users, it can use location and one-tap payment; Doubao sits inside Douyin, and Tencent’s Yuanbao lives in WeChat linked to WeChat Pay.
The marketing blitz has been enormous. Alibaba said it earmarked more than $430 million for holiday promotions; Tencent and Baidu distributed millions in coupons and prizes. Morgan Stanley estimated that the biggest apps together spent over $1.1 billion on Lunar New Year promotions. The giveaways drove massive traffic: QuestMobile reported over 73.5 million people used Qwen on Feb. 7 during the promotion, while Doubao saw daily users spike beyond 144 million after tie-ins with state-TV gala events.
Analysts note the strategy echoes earlier battles that expanded China’s digital economy. “Competition between domestic Chinese tech players is heating up again, which I believe is a good thing, from the perspective of innovation,” said George Chen of the Asia Group. Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution says Alibaba treats Qwen as a potential new everything app, a conversational interface to many online and offline services.
But questions remain about retention and sustainability. Promotions overwhelmed some restaurants as orders surged, and daily usage of many chatbots fell after the holiday spike. For many users, a free drink was enough to test the feature — not necessarily to change long-term habits. The current phase is less about proving the AI’s superiority and more about convincing users that chatbots can be a convenient, everyday way to shop and transact.