The chatbot war in China is turning artificial intelligence into an everyday shopping tool
Chatbots in China have become a full-blown battleground, and consumers are caught right in the middle. But unlike what you might expect, this crossfire comes loaded with free milk tea, generous coupons, and billions of dollars in promotions.
While American artificial intelligence companies race to see who has the best technology and the most impressive benchmarks, Chinese tech giants are playing a completely different game. This game involves getting you to use the chatbot to buy things, order food, pay bills, and ultimately reach a point where you can not imagine life without it. The most interesting part is that this playbook has already been used before in China, just with digital payments, and the result was an e-commerce revolution that the rest of the world tried to copy. Now, history seems to be repeating itself, but this time with artificial intelligence at the center of everything. 🤖
How it all started: massive promotions during the Lunar New Year
The story of Li Hao, a 19-year-old delivery driver in Beijing, paints a pretty clear picture of what is happening right now. Li considers himself a loyal user of Doubao, ByteDance’s AI chatbot and the most popular one in China. But during the Lunar New Year holiday in February, he decided to try another assistant, Qwen from Alibaba, for a very simple reason: the company was giving away free milk tea to anyone who placed an order through the chatbot.
Li tried it, got his milk tea, and then never went back to Qwen. He went straight back to Doubao. That dynamic sums up the battle lines drawn in the Chinese AI chatbot market with remarkable precision.
The competitive landscape among artificial intelligence apps in China is fierce. Companies are dumping money into the market trying to win over customers and show how AI can be useful in everyday life, especially for buying things. The free milk tea was not just about attracting new users. It was about getting them used to the idea of using chatbots for shopping.
The numbers are staggering. Alibaba alone said it allocated more than 430 million dollars for promotions during the holiday. Tencent and Baidu distributed millions in coupons and prizes. Investment bank Morgan Stanley estimated that the leading apps spent a combined more than 1.1 billion dollars on promotions during the Lunar New Year, a period when Chinese people traditionally exchange red envelopes filled with money as good luck gifts.
The major players in this race
The AI market in China is dominated by some of the country’s biggest tech companies. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are among the top names, but there are also startups that rose to prominence quickly, like Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, which caused a stir in early 2025 by introducing an artificial intelligence model that exceeded global market expectations.
Each of these companies has a different strategy for weaving their chatbots into people’s lives, but the underlying principle is the same: embed artificial intelligence into platforms that Chinese people already use every single day.
Qwen, from Alibaba, for example, makes ordering a milk tea almost as simple as telling the chatbot you want one. The command instantly generates suggestions for drinks available at nearby stores. You just pick one, say how you like it, and you are done, all within the AI app itself, without being redirected to another app or website. If you already use Alipay, Alibaba’s payment app, Qwen already knows where you are, processes the payment with a single tap, and figures out where to send the delivery.
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Doubao, from ByteDance, is built into Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, functioning like a person you chat with through direct messages. Yuanbao, Tencent’s chatbot, is integrated into WeChat, the most popular messaging platform in China, and connected to WeChat Pay.
And unlike apps such as Doordash or Uber Eats, these chatbots go way beyond ordering food. You can use the same conversation for all kinds of transactions, from buying a plane ticket to hailing a ride or booking a doctor’s appointment.
The vision behind the promotions: the chatbot as a super app
Kyle Chan, a researcher who tracks the Chinese tech sector at the Brookings Institution, says Alibaba wants to turn Qwen into the new app for everything. According to him, the company sees the AI model as the starting point for interacting with practically everything you do in the online world and, to some extent, in the real world too.
George Chen, a technology analyst at the Asia Group in Hong Kong, said the competition among Chinese tech giants is heating up again, and that this is a positive thing from an innovation standpoint. For him, the spending on holiday promotions brought a strong sense of deja vu.
About a decade ago, Alibaba and Tencent fought a similar promotional war, but over their digital payment apps. Chen argues that it was precisely that competition that propelled Chinese e-commerce to grow so rapidly. China’s e-commerce ecosystem is now one of the most developed in the world, with omnipresent super apps where you can do everything from paying an electricity bill to booking a cruise, with fast delivery covering virtually the entire country.
His take sums up the moment nicely: history is repeating itself. Only this time, the battlefield is artificial intelligence.
Impressive results, but challenges ahead
The Lunar New Year promotions were so massive that they caused chaos at some delivery shops when orders skyrocketed, according to videos and reports published on the Chinese internet. But they also pushed the number of daily active users on AI platforms to all-time highs.
Chinese research firm QuestMobile reported that more than 73.5 million people used Qwen on February 7, when the promotion was taking off. Alibaba did not release official numbers.
Doubao, from ByteDance, also saw its numbers soar, surpassing 144 million daily active users after a partnership with Chinese state television to run promotions during the traditional Lunar New Year gala, one of the most-watched programs in the country.
Keeping those users around, however, is a whole different challenge. Daily usage dropped after the holiday frenzy passed, according to reports published in Chinese media. The story of delivery driver Li Hao shows exactly that pattern: after cashing in on Qwen’s free milk tea, he went straight back to his favorite chatbot, Doubao.
The race nobody expected to see happen this fast
For a long time, the AI debate revolved around who had the most sophisticated model, the best test scores, and the most talented researchers. China entered that conversation in a way that caught a lot of people off guard. Instead of trying to win on the technical side first, Chinese companies decided to win on adoption. To do that, they did what has always worked incredibly well over there: hand out real, immediate benefits to anyone willing to try the product.
We are not talking about token discounts or boring freebies. We are talking about massive incentive strategies that put chatbots into the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people in a matter of months. Companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance invested heavily to integrate their AI tools directly into the platforms that Chinese people already use every day.
The logic is simple: if you are already in the app to buy, pay, or chat, why not use the chatbot that is right there, just one tap away, and even get a coupon for it? Every interaction with the assistant generates data, preferences, behavior patterns, and purchase intent that feed the algorithms and make the experience increasingly personalized. It is a self-reinforcing cycle, and Chinese companies understood this before almost anyone else put it into practice.
Promotions as a gateway to intelligent e-commerce
What is happening now in the Chinese AI market has a pretty clear parallel with the period between 2013 and 2016, when Alipay and WeChat Pay waged a subsidy war to win over digital payment users. Back then, the companies went so far as to distribute billions of yuan in digital hongbaos, the famous virtual red envelopes stuffed with money, just to get people to download the apps and try paying by phone.
The result was that China became the world’s largest digital payments economy, with the vast majority of urban transactions done by smartphone. Now, the same playbook is being applied to chatbots, and the stakes are just as high.
In the e-commerce world, the integration with AI chatbots is already transforming the way people shop online. Instead of browsing through endless categories or waiting for a human agent, consumers simply describe what they want, receive personalized suggestions, compare prices, read reviews summarized by the assistant, and complete the purchase, all within a single conversation.
Promotions work as the initial hook, but what keeps users inside the ecosystem is the convenience that builds up over time. The more you use the chatbot to shop, the more it learns about your tastes, your history, and your preferences. The more it learns, the more the recommendations make sense. And the more the recommendations make sense, the less you feel like looking somewhere else.
What the rest of the world can learn from this move
Watching what is happening in China with AI chatbots is like having access to a massive real-time laboratory. The strategies being tested now will, at some point, show up in other parts of the world, adapted to each cultural and regulatory context.
Using promotions to speed up technology adoption is a tactic that has already worked with digital wallets, ride-hailing apps, and streaming platforms, so there is no reason to think it will be any different with conversational artificial intelligence. The U.S. market, for example, already has a huge base of users accustomed to chatbots in customer service, and the transition to AI-powered shopping assistants with generative AI capabilities could happen faster than many expect.
But beyond the commercial strategies, what really deserves attention is the structural impact this movement is having on global e-commerce. When chatbots stop being just support channels and become the main point of contact between consumer and brand, the entire logic of product discovery, cart management, and post-sale changes. Traditional visual interfaces with menus, filters, and product grids start losing ground to dynamic conversations that adapt the shopping flow in real time.
This requires companies of all sizes to rethink not only the technology they use but also how they structure their offerings, train their recommendation systems, and personalize their communications with the end consumer.
The takeaway: good technology needs a simple reason to become part of the routine
China is showing, once again, that mass adoption of a technology rarely happens just because it is technically impressive. It happens when there is a concrete, immediate benefit for the person who is going to use it.
AI chatbots are technically sophisticated, but what is getting hundreds of millions of people to chat with them every day are the discount coupons, the freebies, the giveaways, and the shopping experiences that genuinely make life easier. At the end of the day, the best technology in the world still needs a simple, human reason to become part of people’s routines.
And China seems to have figured out exactly what that reason is: making the chatbot so useful and so deeply woven into daily life that ignoring it just does not make sense. Whether this model will work in other markets, only time will tell. But the numbers we are seeing right now are really hard to ignore. 🛒
