Chinese AI applications now have bigger aims — they're looking beyond chatbots

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — A slew of releases last week demonstrate how Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and ByteDance have moved quickly with artificial intelligence models that compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Now, many companies in China are increasingly building on that foundation to develop products that look to go beyond a chatbot.

Baidu, best known for its search engine and Ernie chatbot, said Tuesday its generative AI-integrated Wenku platform for quickly creating powerpoints and other documents had reached 40 million paying users, with revenue up 60% from a year ago as of the end of last year. Updated features, such as using AI to generate a presentation based on a company's financial filing, started being rolled out to users in the last week.

On the corporate side, Gartner data and analytics director analyst Ben Yan estimates more than 10% of businesses in China are using AI, up from 8% about six months ago. That would be a pickup in pace — the last 2 percentage point increase in adoption took more than a year, he said Wednesday.

«With our clients, we hear more and more success stories,» he said in Mandarin translated by CNBC. Yan noted that so-called AI agents will help speed up corporate implementation of the new tech.

AI models focus on specific functions such as search and generating summaries, whereas AI agents are more advanced — they can automate entire processes from searching to booking. One example is OpenAI's new «Operator» function that claims to be able to make restaurant reservations on behalf of a ChatGPT user.

AI agents are also on the verge of coming to the Chinese market at scale.

Tencent plans to soon integrate AI agents with its messaging and social media app WeChat, CEO Pony Ma told staff in a Jan. 13