Aggressive holiday giveaway campaigns from China’s top AI companies appear to have paid off — at least in the short term.
The tech firms gave away cars, shopping vouchers, and even cash to increase AI app engagement around Lunar New Year. China’s ByteDance said it logged 1.9 billion interactions during a widely watched new year’s gala; at one point, it processed 63.3 billion tokens in a single minute, equivalent to about 47 billion English words. Alibaba said nearly 200 million orders were placed through its AI agent interface, including 55 million cups of milk tea.
“This is the commerce-as-interface thesis at scale,” a China tech analyst wrote, but it remains to be seen whether the holiday hype will create lasting consumer habits.