3 billion! Alibaba Qianwen ramps up the Spring Festival AI Battle

Alibaba Qianwen Makes a Strong Entry into the Spring Festival AI Battle.

On February 2nd, Qianwen APP announced a 3 billion yuan investment to launch the “Spring Festival Guest Invitation Plan,” offering free meals and entertainment nationwide during the Spring Festival to experience a new lifestyle in the AI era. Alibaba’s ecosystem businesses such as Taobao Flash Sale, Fliggy, Damai, Hema, Tmall Supermarket, and Alipay will also join the Qianwen Spring Festival offensive.

It is reported that this 3 billion yuan scale investment not only sets a new high for Alibaba’s annual Spring Festival activity spending but also tops the list among major internet companies’ Spring Festival AI battles this year.

Every Spring Festival, it is a “must-claim” battleground for internet giants, but their investment approaches vary, and their strategic goals differ.

Unlike Tencent’s social fission distribution of 1 billion red envelopes with Yuanbao, or ByteDance’s Doubao sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala, Qianwen’s strategic goal this time is directly aimed at AI lifestyle integration, attempting to build a differentiated competitive barrier through ecological collaboration and deepen the public’s understanding of AI’s practical value.

According to the official WeChat account of Qianwen APP, the “Qianwen Spring Festival Guest Invitation Plan” will officially launch on February 6, emphasizing “Eat, drink, play, and be entertained, with continuous free offers,” along with large cash red envelopes.

Although the specific activity formats have not yet been disclosed, netizens have already sensed clues of the Spring Festival offensive from Qianwen’s early actions.

On January 15th, Qianwen APP announced integration with Alibaba ecosystem scenarios such as Taobao Flash Sale, Alipay, Taobao, Fliggy, Gaode, and others to test AI shopping functions.

Currently, when querying movie tickets, users can purchase tickets directly on the main chat page of Qianwen APP. An insider revealed that the AI movie ticket purchasing feature is in closed beta and will be fully launched soon.

Industry insiders speculate that Qianwen APP may continue the “capable of handling affairs” approach, launching functions for buying New Year goods, milk tea and coffee, movie tickets, flight tickets, hotels, and attraction tickets, all with direct free offers through guest invitations.

This means that in the Spring Festival AI battle, Alibaba has played a “want to get but can’t learn” card: integrating the entire Alibaba ecosystem—Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, and others—into Qianwen APP, and during the Spring Festival period, effectively popularizing the “AI handling affairs” feature through clever “free” incentives.

In fact, Qianwen has already demonstrated and implemented technology to outline a new consumer landscape during the Spring Festival: users no longer need to switch repeatedly between multiple apps. They can simply give a natural language command to Qianwen, whether it’s “Help me buy a Bawang Tea Princess Bó Yá Jué Xián and deliver it home,” or “Book round-trip flights for Sanya during the Spring Festival for two adults and one child,” or “Recommend a full set of outdoor gear suitable for family hiking in the Four Girls Mountain and place an order.” Relying on Alibaba’s ecosystem services, Qianwen can complete the entire process from demand analysis, solution recommendation, order creation, to payment and fulfillment.

An internal source from Qianwen revealed: “The release half a month ago was actually preparation for the Spring Festival offensive. Most AI assistants on the market are still at the chat stage, but Qianwen hopes to integrate into people’s real-life consumption during this Spring Festival.”

Looking back at last year’s Spring Festival, DeepSeek became a symbol of AI technological evolution with its breakthrough deep thinking ability. This year, Qianwen APP focuses on the AI lifestyle agent track, integrating ecological resources to land in real-life scenarios, potentially sparking a nationwide wave of AI application popularization.

As large model competition enters the “application is king” stage, AI assistants are becoming the next-generation interaction hub. The Spring Festival, as a national traffic peak period, is a golden window for cultivating user habits and capturing minds.

Currently, Tencent’s Yuanbao invested 1 billion red envelopes for social fission, Baidu spent 500 million yuan on cash red envelopes to promote Wenxin Assistant, and major companies’ AI battles are already heating up.

Against this backdrop, Qianwen has chosen a differentiated track: not just competing for pure traffic fission, not limited to shallow interactive experiences, but directly targeting core pain points in users’ daily consumption. It uses real cash subsidies to lower the trial threshold and enhances user stickiness with the convenience of “one-sentence handling,” ultimately cultivating a habit of “seeking AI for tasks.”

Alibaba Qianwen’s Spring Festival layout appears to be a holiday marketing campaign, but in essence, it is a concentrated implementation of its AI strategy. This track is Alibaba’s unique advantage.

Unlike pure technical large model competitions or simple online traffic battles, Alibaba’s AI strategy centers on applying AI technology to real-life and business scenarios, solving users’ practical problems. This requires two core supports:

First, strong AI technical capabilities that can accurately interpret users’ natural language needs and provide efficient solutions.

Undoubtedly, Alibaba’s AI technical strength remains at the top of the global echelon. The core capabilities of the Qianwen large model provide reliable support for demand understanding and solution matching.

On January 27th, Alibaba officially released the Qwen3-Max-Thinking flagship reasoning model, setting several authoritative global records, and announced that Qianwen APP will soon integrate this model.

It is also reported that Qwen3-Max-Thinking significantly enhances the native Agent capabilities for autonomous tool invocation. Specifically, after initial fine-tuning for tool use, the team at Tongyi further trained the model on numerous diverse tasks using combined rule-based and reward-based reinforcement learning, enabling Qwen3-Max-Thinking to think more intelligently by integrating tools.

Second, a comprehensive entity service and fulfillment system that can truly land AI-provided solutions, creating a closed loop from instruction to result.

Within Alibaba’s ecosystem, businesses such as Taobao, Alipay, Hema, Fliggy, Gaode, and others cover all consumer scenarios including shopping, payments, dining, travel, and cultural tourism, building a service and fulfillment network that spans online and offline (300959). This network can efficiently handle Qianwen’s AI commands, from order generation and payment settlement to terminal fulfillment, achieving full-chain connectivity.

This is a new “AI +实体” (AI + physical entities) path that is difficult to replicate.

The combination of a top-tier “brain” with omnipresent “hands and feet” allows Qianwen to complete the full chain from intelligent understanding to on-the-ground fulfillment. This mode of deeply integrating technological infrastructure with physical ecology not only creates Alibaba’s unique competitive moat but also opens a new, locally characteristic, and long-term viable path for the commercialization of AI industry worldwide.

In the long run, the AI battle during the 2026 Year of the Horse Spring Festival will not only bring “AI handling” into the daily lives of thousands of families but also define the next stage of industry competition.

Only AI players capable of solving real problems, closing the loop on business services, and penetrating into people’s daily scenarios will hold the initiative in the next-generation interaction revolution. Alibaba Qianwen’s differentiated approach not only gives itself an early lead in AI lifestyle integration but also explores a new inclusive and verifiable path for industry-wide implementation. The era of AI fully integrating into public life is accelerating from vision to reality.