Alibaba Group is pushing its Qwen model beyond chatbot-style interactions, a move that underscores its ambition to turn its flagship artificial-intelligence product into a consumer-facing agent.

The e-commerce giant's latest effort is a $434 million Lunar New Year promotion to get draw more customers to its Qwen app, which integrates the chatbot into the wider Alibaba ecosystem and allowing it to carry out tasks on users' behalf.

The payoff looks sizable so far.

Alibaba said Thursday that the app attracted more than 120 million orders in the six days after the launch of the festive promotion, which offers incentives like free milk tea coupons to consumers.

The move "could significantly grow the user base of its Qwen app, which would drive growth and share gain of its e-commerce and local services," Jefferies analysts said in a note this week.

Market participants are closely watching global momentum around AI agents, with recent updates from Anthropic's Claude Cowork and OpenClaw on automated workflows in the spotlight.

Chinese tech companies are stepping up their AI offerings too.

TikTok parent ByteDance and its short-video competitor Kuaishou Technology both recently unveiled major updates to video-generation tools, while start-up Zhipu AI released an updated large-language model featuring improved agentic ability and coding ability. Peer MiniMax unveiled an open-source model on its overseas agent website.

More rollouts could be on the way, as firms in China typically use the Lunar New Year to announce new products and marketing campaigns, looking to cash in on festive demand.

Tencent invested 1 billion yuan, or about $144.6 million, in its Lunar New Year digital red packet giveaway campaign, while Baidu committed 500 million yuan.

ByteDance is also planning a massive giveaway on its AI app Doubao for the holiday period, offering tech products as gifts and red packets of up to 8,888 yuan through lucky draw on Doubao.