Alibaba Group Holding announced on Tuesday the formation of a new division dedicated to advancing consumer utilization of its artificial intelligence applications, built on the Qwen family of large language models.

The newly created division, named the Qwen Consumer Business Group, will be headed by Alibaba vice-president Wu Jia. This unit will manage the Qwen chatbot app, the Quark AI assistant and cloud drive, AI hardware products, the UC Browser, and the online reading platform Shuqi.

This organizational shift marks a significant change at Alibaba as it seeks to enhance consumer interaction with its AI solutions, following its dominance in open-source models for developers. The primary objective of the division is to transform the Qwen chatbot into a versatile “super app” usable in various scenarios, including eyewear, personal computers, and vehicles.

The reorganization merges the former Intelligent Information Business Group with the Intelligent Connectivity Business Group. The latter is responsible for consumer hardware such as the TmallGenie smart speaker and Alibaba’s AI glasses, both of which are overseen by Wu.

The Qwen app, a revamped version of Alibaba’s previous Tongyi app, was relaunched in November. It is considered the company’s most ambitious venture into the consumer AI market to date, facing competition from foreign AI firms like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI, as well as domestic competitors including ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, DeepSeek, and Moonshot.

Alibaba reported that the versatile Qwen app, which offers capabilities such as answering queries, transcribing audio, generating photos and videos, conducting research, and creating slide presentations, achieved more than 10 million downloads in its first week of public beta. This outpaced the initial download rates of ChatGPT and DeepSeek upon their launches.