Tencent's WorkBuddy Opens AI Office Ecosystem to Software and Hardware Partners
Tencent's WorkBuddy has opened its AI office platform to software vendors including Beisen, FanRuan and Yunzhangfang, and hardware makers such as Plaud, iFlytek and Rokid. Partners gain a new entry point; WorkBuddy gains vertical skills, but revenue sharing is still undecided.
The push follows two months in which China's major internet companies focused on internal consolidation of their AI office products. Tencent, carrying a strong consumer background, has been building individual user numbers for WorkBuddy while pushing into the enterprise market; Alibaba, with a large enterprise customer base, entered from the business side with Qwen Office; ByteDance has centred its effort on Doubao Work, built on the consumer reach of Doubao. With the product lines narrowed to one core office product each, drawing in outside ecosystems has become the next front.
The software side of the collaboration rests on a change in how agents connect to enterprise systems. In the chatbot era, an AI product was largely an added chat window; an agent that is embedded in enterprise workflows needs to call on existing business systems and data. Enterprise software has spent a decade building those connections, with platforms such as WeCom, Feishu and DingTalk serving as collaboration gateways to vertical SaaS providers like Beisen and FanRuan. In the agent era, the connection shifts from people finding software to capabilities being called: a user states a task, and the agent selects the relevant skill, expert or connector. For a FanRuan user, for example, a request for merchandising, e-commerce or inventory analysis can be handled inside WorkBuddy, where an expert pulls data from the BI system through a connector and returns a finished report.
How deep that integration can go is still being tested. Wang Yao, vice president of Beisen and general manager of its South China region, said the company's open capabilities to WorkBuddy are divided by scenario. For assistant-type use, WorkBuddy already functions as a super gateway for basic tasks such as querying HR data. For expert products that carry the company's know-how, local deployment risks the model being distilled, so Beisen is considering keeping them in the cloud at this stage; security, data handling and iteration efficiency in the cloud are the next areas for cooperation. Weng Qi, an ecosystem product manager at Tencent WorkBuddy, described the same problem as an industry pain point and said security is a focus for WorkBuddy going forward.
The division of labour also touches how software is priced. Yunzhangfang chief operating officer Wang Qian said WorkBuddy is changing the model of charging per seat or per function, moving toward payment based on skill or token consumption, which turns software delivery into delivery of results.
On the hardware side, voice-capture devices dominate the first partner group, including headsets, glasses and recorders. Plaud partner and Asia-Pacific business head Sun Chi said users ultimately want an executable result rather than a meeting summary, which is where Plaud and office products such as WorkBuddy fit together: instead of only transcribing a meeting, the agent is expected to generate tasks, distil conclusions and produce the finished output. WorkBuddy used the event to describe a vision of one account and one data asset across devices, tied to its AI memory capability, so that work information generated on different hardware accumulates in the same agent system.
Capabilities are combined as well. I Flytek brings AI hardware and on-device models, while WorkBuddy handles the higher-level agent tasks; headsets and glasses provide voice capture and translation, which WorkBuddy calls through skills and combines with other work data. Lin Zuolu, who heads WorkBuddy's open ecosystem at Tencent, said hardware terminals can work with WorkBuddy either as peripheral input devices or by letting WorkBuddy's cloud agent call, manage and operate terminal capabilities. Huawei watches illustrate the second path. On September 7, Tencent WorkBuddy launched a HarmonyOS watch version offering voice notes, meeting highlight extraction and idea capture, with synchronisation across phones and computers.
The early results cited at the event are mostly on the software side. FanRuan strategy vice president Shen Tao said nine FanRuan experts have been connected to WorkBuddy and have generated tens of thousands of calls, with data analysis accounting for a significant share of the most-used products, reflecting how much office work involves routine reporting and analysis. Xin Zhiyun, vice president and chief information officer of GF Securities, said the data and feedback generated when users call skills or expert services through WorkBuddy can form a loop of release, application, feedback and further iteration that helps software vendors improve models and skills. Rokid co-founder and vice president Cai Guoxiang said connecting to WorkBuddy lets AI glasses help employees handle work away from their desks simply by speaking.
Money remains the open question. Leiphone reported that WorkBuddy and its hardware partners currently earn separately: hardware makers take hardware sales revenue, while WorkBuddy uses a subscription model billed by credit quotas in a package. The software side is also still exploratory. As Shen Tao put it, WorkBuddy and other AI office products are still in a user education phase, where getting users to adopt the product matters more than payment, which will be considered at a later stage. The ecosystem launch established the first step of connecting software and hardware capabilities and testing the value of those connections; how new value is shared once it is commercially proven is the question that follows.