On Feb. 1 Tencent launched a high‑visibility New Year campaign centered on its AI assistant Yuanbao, putting 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes into circulation through the Yuanbao app. The promotion runs until Feb. 17 and mixes traditional viral mechanics — lottery draws, timed “red‑envelope rains” and shareable gifts — with an explicit product push: single packets can reach up to ¥10,000 and users must install Yuanbao to redeem shared rewards.
The giveaway is only the most visible element of a broader strategy. Tencent is testing a suite of social features under the working name “Yuanbao Pai”, enabling small groups to create or join parties and use collaborative tools such as “Ask Yuanbao”, shared screens, watch‑along video and synced music listening. The company’s chairman, Ma Huateng, has openly framed the campaign as an attempt to recapture the explosive social momentum that WeChat’s red‑envelope feature once generated.
The move sits inside an industry‑wide sprint. Baidu has opened a 500 million yuan pool for users of its Wenxin assistant through mid‑March, ByteDance’s cloud arm has been named the exclusive AI cloud partner for the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, and Alibaba’s Qianwen app is already sponsoring major entertainment events. Tech firms are using the cultural high ground of the Lunar New Year and gala broadcasts to bulk up AI user bases and surface interactive scenarios for assistants.
Economists and industry observers see the campaign as a different kind of competitive fight than the 2010s’ “traffic wars.” Hu Yanping, a distinguished professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, describes it as a land‑grab for AI users and capabilities rather than merely a battle for eyeballs. He warns that unprecedented ad saturation during the holiday could blunt the short‑term effectiveness of promotions; the true arbiter of long‑term success will be product quality — model performance, agent utility and scenario fit — that sustains retention and consumer value.
That shift in metrics matters. Firms are racing not just to attract downloads but to grow daily active users and a higher “UP value” — a shorthand for user contribution to a platform’s economic ecology — through useful, repeatable AI functions. Early commercial scenarios cited by observers include booking and reservations, e‑commerce integration and healthcare triage, areas where assistants can both improve user experience and justify ongoing monetization.
The campaign also underscores a pragmatic commercial logic: cultural moments are cheap channels to bootstrap behaviour. Spring Festival publicity ties can accelerate adoption, generate fresh conversational data and create visible social use cases that help embed assistants in everyday life. But the strategy is costly, and analysts caution that scale and persistence of use will depend on whether these AI products can convert promotional traffic into habitual, value‑creating interactions.