by JIANG Yiman

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has created a new AI unit and is preparing to launch an enterprise AI agent, stepping up efforts to automate workplace tasks as Chinese tech giants race to dominate the emerging market.

Alibaba set up a new unit, Alibaba Token Hub (ATH), on March 16 to focus on "creating, distributing and applying tokens," Chinese media said. The group will report directly to CEO Eddie Wu.

The restructuring also revealed a previously undisclosed Wukong business unit developing an AI-native workplace platform for businesses, signaling Alibaba's push to embed large language models into enterprise workflows.

Southern Metropolis Daily reported that the company could release an enterprise AI agent product as early as this week. The application, developed by Alibaba's workplace collaboration platform DingTalk, aims to offer stronger capabilities than OpenClaw, a recently popular open-source AI agent framework.

Alibaba is also considering integrating services such as Taobao, Alipay and Alibaba Cloud into the agent platform to build a broader enterprise ecosystem.

The company is expanding its push into consumer AI as well. On Nov. 17, 2025, Alibaba announced the Qwen project as part of efforts to compete with products such as ChatGPT in the consumer AI market.

During the 2026 Lunar New Year holiday, Alibaba rolled out a 3 billion yuan (US$435 million) promotional campaign, its largest Spring Festival marketing push.

Heavy AI investment has weighed on earnings. For the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2025, Alibaba reported revenue of 247.8 billion yuan, up 5% year on year, or 15% excluding divested businesses including Sun Art Retail and Intime.

Adjusted EBITA fell 78% to 9.07 billion yuan, while net income attributable to ordinary shareholders dropped 52% to 20.99 billion yuan. Non-GAAP net profit declined 72% to 10.35 billion yuan.

Alibaba CFO Toby Xu said the company's 380 billion yuan three-year AI infrastructure investment plan may prove conservative as server deployment struggles to keep pace with demand.

Competition to develop AI agents is intensifying in China's technology sector. Companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu and Tencent are racing to build software capable of automating complex digital tasks.

Data from developer platform CSDN and the Prospective Industry Research Institute show China's AI agent market could grow from 55.4 billion yuan in 2023 to 852 billion yuan by 2028, a compound annual growth rate of 72.7%. Enterprise AI agent applications reached 23.2 billion yuan in 2025.

Alibaba shares closed up 1.13% at HK$134 on March 16.