Tencent's Tong Pivots AI to Enterprise, WorkBuddy at 32M MAU

Tencent Cloud CEO Dowson Tong is reorganizing the company's AI effort around businesses rather than consumer chatbots, with the WorkBuddy agent now at 32 million monthly users and used by half of China's top 500 companies, according to a profile from Bloomberg.

The pivot followed a blunt verdict from founder Pony Ma, who called Tencent's AI effort "a leaky ship" this summer as the company fell behind DeepSeek, ByteDance and Alibaba in the post-ChatGPT reset. Tong, a Silicon Valley veteran and one of Ma's key lieutenants, proposed shifting the focus to enterprise customers.

WorkBuddy bundles Tencent's messaging and office tools with agents that process data and produce reports. The broader enterprise suite rolled out in May alongside a creative agent, Miora, and a Model-as-a-Service platform called TokenHub that lets customers pick among models rather than being locked into Tencent's own Hunyuan family. Hunyuan has had more than 30 releases over the past year; the next, Hy4, is a reasoning and visual model with a lower-cost Flash variant.

Tong points to internal evidence that enterprise AI pays. CodeBuddy, Tencent's in-house coding assistant used by more than 12,000 engineers, generates more than 50% of all new code at the company and has cut coding time by more than 40%.

"The second half of the AI race is just beginning," Tong wrote, adding that "new opportunities keep emerging, the market landscape is shifting, and neither business models nor value distribution across the industry chain are set in stone." His framing is marathon rather than sprint, and the enterprise pivot is one more move in the broader Chinese AI recalibration we have been tracking across 303 China AI stories over the last 90 days.