Three office-agent robots stand on podiums of different heights, the tallest crowd of visitors flowing toward the first, smaller crowds to the others.

A puzzled researcher holds up a measuring tool with no markings, looking at the crowd of footprints rather than people.

The winning office robot opens its chest to show interchangeable model brains that a customer is choosing between.

The robot rides along a vast network of workplace chat bubbles and office buildings, while small model-lab workshops sit off to the side.

Illustration, AI-generated from the story text. Tap a panel to read the story through it.

Morning Brief · October 31st 2026

Tencent's WorkBuddy draws 85 million monthly visits, almost twice Alibaba's office agent

Tencent's WorkBuddy work agent logged 85.34 million visits in September, Seoul Economic Daily reported on Friday, about 1.8 times Alibaba's Qwen Office (46.55 million) and 2.8 times ByteDance's Doubao Work (30.39 million). The paper did not name its measurement source, and visits are not users.

Tencent's own Hunyuan models trailed Chinese rivals last year, and Tencent Cloud lets customers pick Hunyuan, DeepSeek or Kimi underneath. If WorkBuddy is winning, it is winning on WeChat and enterprise distribution, which would hand China's agent market to whoever owns the workplace software rather than to model labs like DeepSeek and Moonshot. SourcesB

Sources

BTencent's AI comeback: work agent doubles rivals' traffic (Seoul Economic Daily)en.sedaily.com

This story ran in the Morning Brief of October 31st 2026.

Hobbyists turn Qwen models hostile by adjusting two neurons, and trade 213 recipes for it

Gemini's computer-use tool is now generally available to developers