Author | Li Xiao

In the past twenty years, if a person wanted to use Internet services, he usually needed to find the corresponding entrance first.

To chat, you need to open QQ or WeChat, to shop, you need to open an e-commerce platform, to book tickets, you need to enter a travel app, and to handle work, you need to switch back and forth between emails, documents, meetings, and various enterprise software. Internet companies build business models around these entrances, and compete for users, traffic, and ecology around these entrances.

Agent is changing the rules.

When an intelligent agent can understand human intentions, call different software, and complete tasks across system boundaries, users no longer need to remember so many entries. Software still exists, but they may no longer face users directly, but become the tools and capabilities behind the Agent.

The change of the entrance means the change of the connection relationship.

From QQ to WeChat, Tencent has twice seized the connection opportunities brought about by technological changes. Now, as Agents begin to enter the real business processes of enterprises, the connection business that Tencent used to be good at is facing a new test: Can it extend its ability to connect people to the ability to connect people and production systems?

This time, Tencent tried to put the answer on WorkBuddy.

Since its launch in March this year, WorkBuddy has completed a total of 9 billion task requests in more than 7 months, and the enterprise version covers 50% of the top 500 Chinese companies.

“Every round of technological change will bring about a round of ecological reconstruction.” At the recent 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecology Conference, Li Qiang, Vice President of Tencent Group and President of Government and Enterprise Business, said.

At the Ecosystem Conference, Tencent further released Buddy One, which uses WorkBuddy as its workbench.

Internally, it connects Tencent documents, Tencent meetings, Tencent network disks and ima, unifies accounts, points pools and data pools, and integrates Tencent’s office ecosystem; externally, it connects existing enterprise systems, third-party agents and mainstream models.

Tencent is trying to redeploy the connectivity capabilities it accumulated in the consumer Internet era to the core of corporate productivity.

However, what Tencent really wants to compete for in the Agent era may not be the next WeChat, but the next operating system level position.

WeChat is the interface between people and the digital world in the mobile Internet era, and WorkBuddy wants to be the interface between Agent and the digital world of enterprises.

The product forms, user groups and business models of the two are different, but the strategic logic behind them is similar:

Whoever can become the center of connection will have the opportunity to participate in defining the rules of the ecology.

▌The biggest problem is not that the model is not strong enough

At the Ecological Conference, Wang Huixing, Vice President of Tencent Group and CTO of Tencent Cloud, told a story:

A global manufacturing company had thousands of employees voluntarily using WorkBuddy before introducing the enterprise version. On the second day after the enterprise version went online, more than 2,000 test accounts were snapped up by employees. After a large-scale all-employee promotion was launched, the number of AI users in the company expanded more than 10 times.

Wang Huixing’s original intention in telling this story is to emphasize the advantages of the enterprise version of WorkBuddy in security governance: It started as Tencent’s internal iOA zero-trust security management system in 2016. After being commercialized externally in 2020, it has now deployed more than 10 million devices. The end-to-cloud Agent full-link security framework can avoid the risk of information leakage caused by enterprise data flowing to personal terminals.

But this story also confirms one thing from the side: AI implementation is not a top-level project like traditional SaaS, but is promoted simultaneously from top to bottom and bottom to top.

Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent Group and CEO of the Cloud and Smart Industry Group, used the phrase “if you don’t advance, you will retreat” to describe the situation of enterprises in market competition in the AI ​​era.

A question also arises: how can individual efficiency improvements be transformed into quantifiable organizational productivity improvements?

This is also a question that Wang Huixing has been asked repeatedly by a large number of customers since WorkBuddy launched the enterprise version. He broke this problem down into four hurdles that companies must overcome, and gave four criteria for evaluation: feasible, trustworthy, measurable, and easy to implement.

Among them, “entrustable” points to security governance, ensuring that the identity, permissions and behavior of the Agent are controllable, and the process is traceable; “measurable” uses the “observable center” to allow enterprises to see where tokens are used, in which departments and scenarios the money is spent, and at which steps tasks are slow or expensive; the “easy to implement” solution is to use digital employees and managed agent platform WMA(WorkBuddy Managed Agents)Enable rapid replication of organizational experience.

But the most critical step is to “run it properly”, which determines whether the Agent can work in the company’s real business process.

Tang Daosheng judged that the biggest problem in the current implementation of Agent in enterprises is not that the model is not strong enough, but that there are too many breakpoints; the key to Agent implementation is connection, allowing the large model to understand the business context and truly enter the workflow.

In the past two decades, Tencent has connected billions of people. Now it needs to connect tools, systems and data scattered in enterprises.

The system construction span of large enterprises spans ten years, with different interfaces, permissions, and calibers. ERP, CRM, OA, finance, human resources, and knowledge bases often work independently. Connecting these breakpoints one by one is a chore. But once it is connected, it is equivalent to building a connection center for the enterprise.

Whoever achieves this will have the deepest moat in the Agent era.

▌Closing can’t block traffic

Placing yourself on the base of connection means maintaining an open stance.

Tang Daosheng made it clear that WorkBuddy has an open product architecture that allows enterprises to develop self-developed Agents, third-party Agents in the ecosystem, and third-party IM access. “The choice of which model to choose, which Agent to connect, and which IM to use all rests with the enterprise.”

At the model layer, Hunyuan Hy4 has been recently released. The official caliber is to strengthen long-range tasks, improve the efficiency of the thinking chain, and introduce visual understanding for the first time. However, users can also call mainstream open source models such as DeepSeek, GLM, MiniMax, and Kimi on demand, and cooperate with Token Plan for unified billing.

IM also has no restrictions and is compatible with DingTalk and Feishu. QuestMobile data shows that in China’s collaborative office market, WeChat Enterprise ranks second with a market share of 23.4%; DingTalk ranks first with about 200 million monthly active users, accounting for 32.7%; Feishu ranks third, with a market share of about 18.9%.

In the era of mobile Internet, IM is the entrance, representing the distribution rights of users, usage time and traffic. Therefore, the more closed the wall, the wider the moat. However, in the Agent era, the role of IM has changed from a traffic gate to a task channel. The communication records and meeting consensus accumulated on it are the context required for AI to understand the business, and are also the most difficult assets to be copied and moved.

Closure cannot block traffic, but will cause breakpoints when the Agent performs tasks, so compatibility is not a gesture, but an inevitable choice. Tencent’s positioning of WorkBuddy is not to replace the original tools and software, but to be a platform that can host all tools, and even an operating system for the Agent era.

But in order to truly break through the breakpoints and integrate into the actual work process, as Tang Daosheng said, to achieve the transition from “centering on file circulation” to “centering on task collaboration,” it is not only necessary to break through the barriers of tools and products and open up technical interfaces, but more importantly, to translate the inherent process system of the enterprise into a context understandable by the agent, and to complete the business implementation at the delivery level.

Therefore, in addition to integrating the enterprise WeChat and Tencent office ecosystem internally, and externally accessing enterprise-owned systems such as ERP and CRM through MCP and connectors to complete product-level “connections”, Tencent is also building an FDE service ecosystem, joining forces with service providers such as Anchang, KPMG, and Approval Technology, and plans to train 10,000 FDE industry engineers in the next year.

FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer, forward deployment engineer)It is a new profession that will quickly become popular in China in 2026. It requires practitioners to both understand the customer’s business and integrate technology into the process. The essence is to help customers sort out the “data structure and relationships” and make the implicit rules of the business explicit. Once FDE helps companies complete the “last mile” of delivery, the connection relationship will be precipitated on Tencent’s platform.

▌Fighting a tough battle with hard cards

In an era of excess models, what is scarce is not stronger AI. Competition in the Agent era is a comprehensive competition of cloud, models, data, portals and delivery capabilities.

In this chain, the cloud is the infrastructure, the gap between the base models is narrowing, data is inflating, entrances are converging, and only delivery is still fighting a tough battle. Delivery capabilities have become the winner and loser in determining the status of a large company, and what determines the delivery results, as mentioned above, is whether the business context can truly be integrated into the enterprise process, the authority, knowledge and governance system of the organization, and the platform capabilities can be transformed into measurable productivity.

Li Qiang said, “Connectivity and openness are Tencent’s unique advantages that have been accumulated for more than 20 years.” This is the “hardest” card in Tencent’s hands. This time, Tencent wants to let it enter the company’s real production environment.

In the past few years, Tencent has not yet formed a clear advantage in the AI ​​application layer. In comprehensive industry rankings, Hunyuan is often placed in the second tier. Instead, WorkBuddy, which was only fully launched in March this year, became Tencent’s first AI-native product.

According to QuestMobile’s “2026 AI Platform Development Research Report”, in July 2026, WorkBuddy PC had 6.582 million monthly active users, with an average monthly usage of 19 times. In July, Tencent integrated another AI product, QClaw, into the WorkBuddy system, and the multi-line exploration of office agents came to an end.

Immediately afterwards, Alibaba launched “Qianwen Office”, which was integrated with three products: QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun; within a month, Byte successively integrated the Feishu product team, TRAE and Kouzi teams into the Doubao system, and launched the independent brand “Doubao Work” in August. In overseas markets, Microsoft 365 Copilot released Copilot Cowork in June this year.

Competition in the office agent track has just begun. Byte’s advantages lie in C-side traffic, beanbao model and rapid organizational adaptability; DingTalk has the process and management mentality of more than 26 million enterprise organizations; Microsoft Copilot relied on a high starting point and high stock of users to achieve more than 30 million paid seats at the end of June this year, with a single-quarter net increase hitting the highest growth rate since its release.

However, the connection that Tencent is best at is also an advantage that is difficult for others to copy.

In an interview with the media, Tang Daosheng said that the commercialization of the WorkBuddy team should be “considered from the perspective of supporting the development of product services” and taking into account the cost pressure and business model of third-party ecological partners.

By 2026, there will be more than 2,000 WorkBuddy ecological partners, and more than 60% of them will cooperate with Tencent for the first time.

Under the framework of “Tencent sets the stage and partners perform,” Tencent is leveraging open platforms and ecology to extend its reach of connection to the lowest-level production environments of thousands of industries.

▌結語

In the era of consumer Internet, the main objects of connection are people, and the value is reflected in the user scale, activity and traffic distribution.

Entering the Agent era, the value of connections is changing. It no longer just allows people to find people and services to find users, but allows intelligent agents to understand the company’s knowledge, call business systems, follow organizational rules, and ultimately complete real work.

This is a more complex and longer project than connecting users. It requires the platform to have both technical capabilities and an understanding of enterprise business; it must not only open up system interfaces, but also solve issues of permissions, security, delivery and organizational collaboration.

Tencent is trying to turn this set of capabilities into a new ecosystem. WorkBuddy is the portal, Buddy One is the platform, and MCP and FDE extend to technical connection and business delivery respectively. In this system, Tencent provides the base and rules, and its partners go deep into the industry to help it extend the connection relationship into the capillaries of enterprise production.

Of course, connection does not equal productivity, and access does not mean true integration. How many core processes an enterprise is willing to let the Agent enter, and how many key tasks it is willing to entrust to it, ultimately determines the value of this ecosystem.

Over the past two decades, Tencent has changed the way people use the Internet through connectivity. The next competition will test whether it can change the way enterprises organize and use productivity through connectivity.

Tencent has held this card for many years. In the Agent era, it finally has the opportunity to fight a deeper, more difficult, and more worthy battle.