By letting companies plug rival models and third-party agents into WorkBuddy, Tencent is betting on distribution inside offices, backed by new data centers in six overseas markets.
Tencent said demand for its AI services outside China grew at a triple-digit percentage rate over the past year and that its overseas cloud business doubled its active customers, as it opened its WorkBuddy office agent to rival models and third-party agents. Dowson Tong, the senior executive vice president who runs Tencent’s cloud and smart industries group, gave the figures at the company’s Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen on October 29, The Paper reported.
Tencent Cloud has deployed more than 2 million servers worldwide, Tong said, according to Jiemian. He did not give an exact growth rate for overseas AI demand.
The summit set out two linked strategies: selling Tencent’s AI tools to companies abroad, and turning WorkBuddy into an open hub at home, where China’s tech giants are in what Caiwen called a heated race to sell office agents.
Tencent is adding data centers on four continents to serve AI demand
Over the past year Tencent added or expanded data centers in Frankfurt, Malaysia, Mexico, Osaka, Riyadh and Thailand, Tong said, and it plans to expand further in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas over the coming year, Beijing News reported in an article republished by Sina.
Tong also pointed to work on Chinese processors. Before traffic surged on its Hy4 Preview model, Tencent Cloud raised the throughput of a single domestic chip fivefold within two weeks, The Paper reported. The company has deployed a domestic thousand-chip cluster for a leading international Tier 1 auto-parts supplier to train driving models, according to the same report.
Tencent said Hy4, the next version of its Hunyuan model, and a cheaper Hy4 flash variant would be released soon, without giving dates. Compared with the preview, Hy4 improves long, multi-step work and adds image understanding for the first time, Beijing News reported.
WorkBuddy opens its doors to rival models and agents
Tencent said WorkBuddy’s enterprise edition, launched in March, now covers 50% of China’s 500 largest companies and 60% of the top 100. The enterprise version is used in more than 50 industries, the open platform has more than 50,000 partners and developers, and more than 200,000 skills, packaged task routines, are listed on it.
WorkBuddy has handled 9 billion task requests since launch, according to a Caiwen report republished by NetEase. EastFrontier reported on October 22 that WorkBuddy led China’s AI office market with 32 million monthly users; Tencent first opened the product to an outside ecosystem in September.
The new step is a fully open architecture. Companies will be able to connect their own agents, third-party agents and third-party messaging systems. "选什么模型、接什么Agent、用什么IM，选择权都在企业手里" (which model, which agent and which messaging app to use is the company’s choice), Tong said, as quoted by The Paper. Tencent also launched Buddy One, a suite that uses WorkBuddy as a workspace and links Tencent Docs, the ima knowledge tool, a new Tencent Drive and other Tencent apps, with a single account and a shared pool of credits and data.
The pitch rests on connection rather than on a single model. Companies would not need to change systems, move data or redo workflows to adopt it, Tencent said, according to China National Radio. Tencent added an enterprise security package, a monitoring center and hosted agents that companies can build from their own workflows. The security tools filter hidden malicious instructions, check extensions before they load, block high-risk actions such as deleting data, and give each agent its own identity so that administrators can trace what it accessed, The Paper reported.
Overseas customer wins will show whether the triple-digit growth lasts
Tencent has not said how much revenue its overseas AI business brings in, so the scale behind the triple-digit growth is unknown. Its next quarterly report, and any breakdown of cloud revenue, international growth and AI capital spending, will show how much the overseas push is adding.
The other test is in China. Hy4’s release date and benchmark results will show whether Tencent’s own model keeps pace inside a product built to work with any model, and named contracts with multinational or Southeast Asian customers would show whether WorkBuddy travels beyond Chinese companies expanding abroad.