A week before the 2026 Lunar New Year, Tencent unleashed a familiar marketing play: a “red‑envelope rain” that pledged RMB 1 billion in cash across its new AI application, Yuanbao. The rush of users briefly strained Yuanbao’s servers, producing the kind of short, intense attention that has become synonymous with holiday promotions in China. The stunt underlines a simple truth—red envelopes still generate reach—but it also raises the central question for Tencent and rivals alike: can festive excitement be converted into everyday AI usage?
The red‑envelope tactic is not new. In 2014 WeChat’s spring‑festival红包 helped mainstream mobile payments by turning a social ritual into a digital onboarding tool. Back then the market was a blank slate: users were curious about mobile payments but hesitant, and a generous, shareable incentive could reshape behavior into a lasting habit. Tencent’s archives show how quickly the mechanic scaled: millions of users participated and billions of interactions followed in a matter of hours, a breakthrough that rewired China’s payments landscape.
AI tools present a fundamentally different battleground. Where payments offered a clear single action—bind your card, make a first transfer—AI interactions are the beginning of an ongoing, personalized workflow. Initial trials matter, but retention depends on whether the tool proves consistently useful across many, varied tasks. Market metrics illustrate this gap: in December 2025 weekly active users for China’s AI‑native apps were led by Doubao at 155 million and DeepSeek at 81.56 million, while Yuanbao trailed at roughly 20.84 million, according to QuestMobile. A festival spike can widen reach, but it may not close orders‑of‑magnitude differences in habitual use.
Tencent’s RMB 1 billion giveaway buys attention efficiently inside its social graph, but the company’s broader AI bet looks much bigger and longer. Tencent reported capital expenditure of RMB 76.8 billion in 2024—largely for GPUs and cloud infrastructure to support AI services—an investment many times the size of a single promotional campaign. That contrast highlights the economics of the AI era: short bursts of user acquisition are cheap relative to the sustained buildout of models, compute, and product polish needed to keep users.
Tencent does possess a rare advantage: WeChat and WeChat’s ecosystem remain deeply embedded in daily life. As of September 2025, WeChat and WeChat‑compatible accounts had 1.414 billion monthly active users, giving any Tencent AI product privileged distribution. If Yuanbao can be woven into everyday flows—chat, payment, content and services—the company may convert festive trial into habitual use. But the social fabric that powers viral red‑envelope distribution does not automatically translate into the intimate, personal habits that AI usage requires.
Practical retention will hinge on Yuanbao’s ability to solve concrete, repeatable tasks. During holidays users demand things like greeting copy, couplets, recipes, travel logistics and edited family photos—tasks that lend themselves to short bursts of AI assistance. Outside the festival window, however, Yuanbao must demonstrate value for individualized queries—planning, learning, creative work—areas where user expectations for speed, accuracy and contextual continuity are high and switching costs are low.
The competitive landscape is intensifying. ByteDance’s Volcano Engine and Alibaba’s Qianwen have already secured prominent spring‑festival integrations with major broadcasters, while Baidu rolled out a RMB 500 million red‑envelope push of its own. The outcome will depend on a mix of distribution, model performance, product depth, and the ability to stitch AI features into everyday tasks across ecosystems.
A holiday giveaway can produce an impressive headline and a burst of traffic, but the long game in AI will be decided by retention metrics, product specificity and infrastructure durability. For Tencent, the red envelope is a door opener; whether Yuanbao becomes a daily companion will be determined not by a single campaign but by countless, ordinary interactions over the months ahead.