China’s spring-sales season has been given an early and unmistakable shove into the age of generative AI. On Feb. 2 the Qianwen app announced a 3 billion yuan (about $420m) “Spring Festival Treat” campaign that promises widespread “free-order” subsidies and large cash red packets across consumption categories, and said it will marshal Alibaba’s ecosystem — Taobao Flash Sale, Fliggy, Damai, Hema, Tmall Supermarket and Alipay among them — to participate in the offensive.
The campaign, which is scheduled to go live on Feb. 6, positions Qianwen not merely as an experiment in conversational AI but as an active transactional layer for everyday spending. The firm has already embedded shopping links in some queries (movie-ticket lookups now surface a purchase entry) and is grey-testing an AI-driven movie-ticket buying function. Qianwen’s public messaging and insiders’ comments make clear the objective: move AI from “chat” to “do” in concrete, high-frequency consumer scenarios.
The announcement follows a competing splash from a rival platform, Yuanbao, which rolled out a 1 billion yuan red-packet giveaway that quickly saturated social feeds. That juxtaposition — a smaller, fast-moving subsidy from Yuanbao and a larger, ecosystem-backed push from Qianwen and Alibaba — highlights an intensifying mid-winter contest for consumer attention and habit formation.
For Chinese platforms the Lunar New Year is the battlefield for customer acquisition and retention. It is a period when households plan travel, entertainment and bulk purchases; a successful campaign can deliver weeks of elevated engagement and years of ingrained behaviour. By offering “免单” (free orders) across food, tickets, travel and retail, Qianwen and its partners hope to train users to turn to an AI assistant first when they want to buy something or book an experience.
The strategic logic is clear. Subsidies convert attention into transactions; transactions produce data that can be used to refine recommendation models and personalise service; personalised service strengthens user lock-in and cross-sell opportunities across the Alibaba stack. Embedding purchase capabilities inside AI interactions closes the loop between discovery and checkout, potentially raising conversion rates and reducing friction for consumers.
There are, however, obvious trade-offs. Heavy subsidy schemes are expensive and compress already thin margins in many consumer services. They invite copycat responses from rivals, potentially triggering a subsidy arms race that hurts smaller merchants and squeezes platforms’ profitability. The use of an AI layer to capture and reroute consumer spending also raises questions about merchant economics, data governance and regulatory scrutiny — areas Beijing has shown a keen interest in recently.
In the short term consumers will likely welcome cheaper tickets, meals and goods, and Qianwen’s AI-driven convenience could accelerate mainstream adoption of transactional AI. In the longer run, the campaign will be a test of whether AI assistants can become habitual intermediaries in commerce — and whether the business economics of that role are sustainable without continued subsidies or sharply improved monetisation.
For international observers the episode is a useful proxy for two broader trends: the speed at which Chinese tech platforms are embedding generative AI into commerce, and the enduring centrality of festival-season spending as a tool of platform competition. How this plays out over the coming weeks will help determine which companies achieve first-mover advantages in an economy where attention, data and payments are tightly entwined.