Tencent wants to bring artificial intelligence agents into its WeChat social media app, the Chinese tech firm’s president said on Wednesday, a move that could change how hundreds of millions of users interact with the platform in the Asian nation and beyond.
Agents — programmes that execute real-life tasks such as sending emails or booking flights — are being touted as AI’s next frontier after chatbots such as ChatGPT.
Their incorporation into WeChat may alter how people in the world’s second-largest economy use the so-called “super-app” that already boasts social messaging, digital payments and a long list of other features.
Tencent, also the world’s largest video game publisher, reported a 16 percent jump in full-year net profit on Wednesday, with gaming still the main business driver even as it extends its AI push.
The company has sought in recent years to integrate AI into WeChat, known as Weixin in China.
“We hope to create AI agents in Weixin, which could leverage Weixin’s close connection with users,” company president Martin Lau told reporters.
“It will be a highly diverse ecosystem, encompassing mini-programs, content, commerce, social networking and payments,” Lau added, without giving details such as when the service would become available.
On Wednesday, Tencent said net profit for 2025 came to 224.8 billion yuan ($32.6 billion), beating estimates of 221.9 billion yuan in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
The company, which owns the developer of popular eSports including “League of Legends”, has sizeable operations in other sectors from cloud computing to entertainment.
Despite being China’s most valuable tech company by market capitalisation, so far Tencent has been seen as a cautious AI player, although founder Pony Ma has vowed to increase investment in the sector.
“Our highly resilient and cash generative core businesses provides us with the resources to fund our increasing investments in AI,” Ma said in a statement Wednesday.
– Agent fever –
Like its rivals Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance, Tencent has recently branched out into the world of AI agents with its WorkBuddy app.
The Shenzhen-based company has also been among the Chinese tech giants racing to take advantage of a surge in interest in the country in OpenClaw — an AI agent platform created by an Austrian programmer that has fascinated the tech world.
Tencent and others are offering simplified installation and affordable coding plans to help users host OpenClaw agents on cloud servers.
