ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent race for AI entry — what are they afraid of?
Douyin logs Avg. daily time of 97 minutes with nearly 950 mn MAU, and WeChat has 1.3 bn MAU, opened 5 bn times a day with 123 minutes of daily time.
Yet these two traffic behemoths are pushing standalone AI portals like Doubao and Yuanbao. The issue is not that legacy apps are broken, but that the AI era has reset the rules — without new entry points, they risk being sidelined by a new ecosystem.The first reason: legacy interaction paradigms don’t fit AI-native needs.
Douyin’s swiping and WeChat’s messaging reflect the mobile logic of tapping icons and passively receiving information. In the AI era, users want speak-and-done, proactive services — from price comparison and checkout to trip planning — which are hard to embed in Douyin’s feed or a WeChat chat box.
ByteDance’s AI phone aims to fuse compute, models, and scenarios into a new interaction layer.
WeChat’s DeepSeek integration into Search is meant to keep users using AI inside social contexts and avoid traffic leakage.More fundamentally, this is a battle for OS control in the AI era.
Microsoft owned distribution in the PC era via Windows, Apple did so in mobile via the App Store; now the core is agent distribution — users may access services through AI agents rather than desktop icons. ByteDance’s standalone Doubao plus an AI phone seek control over compute, models, and hardware, while WeChat’s AI features and Yuanbao aim to cover all AI needs within social to defend its ecosystem hub.Super apps also have structural gaps.
ByteDance lacks a hardware entry point, so an AI phone provides a host for always-on AI services. Doubao serves as the ‘brain’ across these devices.Ultimately, new AI entry points from ByteDance and WeChat are pre-emptive moves.
They are early-stage today, but as with early WeChat, once users form the habit of getting things done via AI portals, they can scale into the next traffic giants.$Alibaba(BABA.US) $ByteDance(BYTED.NA) $TENCENT(00700.HK)
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