Alibaba's special forces launched a nuclear bomb

Alibaba is reshaping the AI competitive landscape with an unprecedented "entrepreneurial state."

On January 15, the Qianwen App announced full integration with Alibaba's ecosystem businesses, including Taobao, Alipay, Taobao Flash Purchase, Fliggy, and Amap, achieving the world's first AI shopping functions for ordering takeout, shopping, and booking flights, and opening testing to all users.

Wu Jia, President of the Qianwen C-end Business Group, stated that this upgrade will launch over 400 AI service functions, making the Qianwen App the world's first AI assistant capable of completing complex real-life tasks, leading the AI industry from the "chat dialogue" era into the "service era."

Industry insiders view this as an organizational explosion of Alibaba's internal "concentrated efforts to accomplish major tasks."

Let AI Work

Wu Jia said, "After AI has a super strong brain, it begins to grow hands and feet that can reach the real world, truly 'working' for users in their lives. Qianwen is the first AI that can really help you get things done, with the advantage of combining the 'Qwen strongest model' with 'Alibaba's richest ecosystem.'"

"The AI service era has just begun, and some capabilities are still being explored," Wu Jia boldly claimed, aiming to make the Qianwen App the most powerful human AI assistant covering everyone.

At the press conference, Wu Jia demonstrated the AI takeout function live, simply giving the Qianwen App a command, "Help me order 40 cups of Ba Wang Cha Ji's Bo Ya Jue Xian," and the Qianwen App quickly called Taobao Flash Purchase to place the order, completing AI payment within the app without any redirection.

Behind this capability is the system-level integration of Qianwen with Taobao Flash Purchase and Alipay's native AI payment capability "AI Pay." Users only need to say in the chat box, "Help me order two lattes," and Qianwen can call on Taobao Flash Purchase's service capabilities, accurately locate, recommend suitable merchants, generate orders, and make payments with one click through the built-in "Alipay AI Pay" function.

After integrating with Taobao, the Qianwen App can truly help users solve the dilemma of "what to buy, how to choose, and whether it's worth buying." The Qianwen App can not only provide shopping suggestions based on users' real needs but also intelligently generate specific product recommendation plans based on Taobao's vast product database and evaluation system. Users only need one command to complete the closed loop from consumption decision to transaction within the Qianwen App.

Wu Jia stated that for consumption scenarios, the marketing information on the internet is complex. How to train the model's understanding and discernment ability is crucial. The Qianwen App relies not only on world knowledge but also utilizes Alibaba's transaction and service data to enhance the model, ensuring that the AI shopping function remains accurate.

For broader life services, the Qianwen App's reach extends into deep areas of government affairs and travel. It has integrated Alipay's government service, launching 50 livelihood services such as visa and household registration, allowing users to complete policy interpretation and directly access processing entry through natural language inquiries In addition, the Qianwen App demonstrates cross-application collaboration capabilities. In the travel scenario during the Spring Festival, the Qianwen App can utilize Fliggy's capabilities to complete flight and hotel bookings, and can leverage Amap's capabilities for itinerary planning and New Year's Eve dinner reservations. Furthermore, the Qianwen App can even directly help users make phone calls to book restaurants.

"Special Forces" Internal Innovation

To seize the entry point of AI to consumers, Qianwen is accelerating its stealth mode at the speed of a startup. In the C4 building of Alibaba's Xixi Park, the atmosphere of transformation is palpable.

Sources close to Alibaba reveal that every Monday morning and Friday evening, the area near the facial recognition access control is piled high with suitcases, as Alibaba employees fly in from Beijing, Guangzhou, and other places. Since September of last year, thousands of engineers from different departments have been conducting closed development here, and this high-intensity operational state will continue.

This "special forces" style of development has allowed the Qianwen App to exhibit extreme entrepreneurial characteristics. It has undergone more than a dozen iterations in less than two months since its launch, maintaining an ultra-high frequency of updates 2 to 3 times a week, with some requirements going from design to launch in just 1 to 3 days. Compared to the business pace of traditional large companies, Qianwen resembles an agile startup.

To break down functional barriers, the workstations in the C4 building are no longer divided by function but are arranged entirely by project teams. Employees from product, development, and algorithm departments are closely grouped together, with product managers sitting directly across from developers, allowing for quick communication of requirements by simply moving chairs.

In this atmosphere, Qianwen has also abandoned complex hierarchical reporting.

Wu Jia, president of Qianwen's consumer business group, rarely sits in a conference room to listen to PPT presentations; he prefers to stand in front of a whiteboard and work through functional logic with the team, co-creating and communicating ideas immediately on the whiteboard.

This return to an entrepreneurial spirit in organizational mode is becoming a core weapon for Alibaba to tackle the challenges of the AI era.

In the AI era, for large companies to engage in AI business, the likely path is to establish a relatively independent organization that returns to the entrepreneurial spirit. At Alibaba, from Taobao Flash Purchase to Qianwen, this change of "concentrating efforts to accomplish major tasks" is reshaping the form of the internet.

Whether it is Qianwen, Tongyi Laboratory, or DingTalk, this change, which is fully committed to changing the world, is becoming a microcosm of the collective transformation of large companies.

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