CEO Wu Jia of Qianwen responds to Qianwen's viral success: It's not about competing for subsidies, but the inevitable trend of AI's future

On February 6th, Alibaba’s AI assistant Qianwen APP officially launched a Spring Festival free giveaway event, which immediately triggered a phenomenon-level explosion. After the event went live, user influx surged, with orders surpassing 10 million within nine hours. On February 14th, Qianwen initiated a second wave of free giveaways, directly pushing domestic AI application competition to a new高潮.

On February 15th, Wu Jia, President of the Qianwen Consumer Business Group, gave an interview to respond to recent hot topics about Qianwen’s popularity. Wu Jia revealed that the free giveaway on February 6th exceeded expectations, with actual orders reaching 15 million on the first day, 15 times the original estimate. He stated that the original intention of Qianwen doing this was not to compete with anyone, and they never thought about internal competition. The true goal was to integrate AI into everyday life scenarios of ordinary people, “This is an inevitable future development.”

“User enthusiasm remains high, but the second wave is actually completely different from the first.” Wu Jia mentioned, “The first wave was about capability verification—to see if AI could run the full ‘understanding—decision—ordering—payment’ chain in real-life scenarios. The second wave, we truly integrated Alibaba’s entire ecosystem. Fliggy’s flights and hotels, train tickets, tickets, Damai movie tickets, and soon to be connected Gaode group buying and ride-hailing, are all within Qianwen.”

According to the timeline, on February 2nd, Qianwen announced an investment of 3 billion yuan to launch the “Spring Festival Hosting Plan,” which officially launched on February 6th, focusing on “food, drinks, entertainment, and nonstop free giveaways,” alongside large cash red envelopes. Additionally, multiple Alibaba ecosystem services such as Taobao Flash Sale, Hema, Tmall Supermarket, and Alipay will gradually join Qianwen’s Spring Festival campaign. It is understood that this investment scale not only set a record for Alibaba’s Spring Festival activities but also represented the highest investment by major tech companies in AI-related activities during the 2026 Year of the Horse Spring Festival.

On February 14th, Qianwen announced an extension of the free giveaway event for three more days and officially integrated Damai and Fliggy, inviting users nationwide to experience new features like AI purchasing movie tickets and scenic spot tickets, fully activating new AI consumption scenarios during the Spring Festival. The event page shows that new users downloading the Qianwen APP will receive a 25-yuan “Super Free Card,” available to everyone; additionally, each time a user invites a new user, both will receive another card of the same type, with a maximum of 10 cards per person. The card claiming activity is limited to three days.

Notably, compared to the first round of free cards, the “Super Free Card” has a significantly expanded scope of use. Besides food delivery and New Year shopping, it can also be used to buy movie tickets, scenic spot tickets, hotel and flight bookings. Alibaba revealed that in the future, Qianwen will gradually launch features such as AI ride-hailing, phone recharge, Gaode “Street Sweeper” group buying, and Taobao shopping, all supporting the use of this card. The Super Free Card will be valid until April 30th and can still be used normally after the Spring Festival.

“From the data, the structural changes are very obvious. High-ticket scenarios like flights, hotels, movie tickets, and scenic spot tickets are rapidly increasing in proportion, with hotel demand growing more than fourfold month-on-month, and flight demand nearly tripling. Users in lower-tier cities and counties are growing faster than those in first- and second-tier cities, indicating AI consumption is sinking.” Wu Jia emphasized in the interview, “More importantly, user behavior has changed. Now users are actively cross-category consuming and even raising more complex demands, such as travel arrangements for the Spring Festival and subsequent service purchases.”

In his view, this trend indicates that AI is gradually evolving from a “chat tool” into a “capable assistant.” Behind a user’s demand, Qianwen can mobilize the entire Alibaba ecosystem to provide services.

Along with Qianwen’s rapid popularity, discussions about “subsidy competition” have emerged. Wu Jia responded, “Our original intention in doing this was not to compete with anyone. We have never thought about internal competition. What we truly want is to integrate AI into people’s daily life scenarios—ordering a cup of milk tea or buying a movie ticket may seem simple, but this is the first time AI is genuinely involved in consumers’ real purchasing decisions and execution chains. This is not about competing for traffic; it’s an inevitable future development.”

It is worth noting that with Qianwen’s explosion, the outside world has begun to see it as a new generation AI traffic portal. Regarding Qianwen’s future positioning, Wu Jia responded, “Based on technological development trends, whether AI will become a traffic portal in the future, or whether the traffic portal form will even exist, is currently hard to predict. But our consistent direction is to truly integrate AI into users’ daily work and life.”

He further pointed out that recently, many AI companies have released new models intensively, and industry competition continues to heat up. He expressed a positive attitude: “I believe that models will keep advancing amid the competition among various companies. We will also continue to pursue higher intelligence and technological advancement. Combining these, we firmly believe that technology should not only aim for the stars and the sea but also serve everyday life.”

It is also noteworthy that after Qianwen ignited China’s AI shopping boom, American tech giants quickly followed suit. On February 11th, Google announced new shopping features in its AI assistant Gemini, allowing users to complete shopping experiences within Google Search’s AI mode and conversations with Gemini, demonstrating that global AI technology is accelerating from “chat” to “capable tasks.”

Wu Jia stated, “I firmly believe that in terms of AI application, China will definitely lead the world. In fact, this is already happening. Our AI shopping is already widely used; Google in the U.S. has only announced it and has not yet started using it.”