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Published on Feb. 21, 2026

Will a free cup of bubble tea make Alibaba the super gateway to AI in China? The internet giant hopes so, at least. It just spent 3 billion yuan (US$430 million) on a lunar new year marketing campaign.

The company gave away bubble tea via its AI App "Qwen". Tens of millions of Chinese who wanted it got their first taste of "agentic AI" in e-commerce.

They said, "bring me a cup of bubble tea," and Qwen handled the rest. This is not AI as search anymore. It is AI for execution. It means that agentic AI is moving from the computer screen into the real world, making real money for companies.

Alibaba hopes that customers will use their AI App to buy many other things. They can say, "book a table for six at a nice restaurant in the city center for seven p.m., and call me a big enough taxi."

Qwen then searches for a nice restaurant, checks somewhere else for traffic jams, calculates the right time to leave home, orders the taxi and pays for it. No other app need to be opened.

This is a pivotal moment for the deployment of AI. It is no longer just used for research or recommendations. The user entrusts it to make decisions and act upon them. AI becomes a new operating system for e-commerce.

Hotels, travel, cars, and houses — everything may be sold like this in the future. Alibaba is also embedding this into B2B transactions.

The implications are huge for the world of marketing. There is also a lesson to be learned for AI companies searching for a monetisation model beyond subscriptions of chatbots.

Agentic AI has just moved into the real world at real scale.

While this story is obviously about more than just a cup of tea and even about more than just e-commerce, it is worth looking at this remarkable bubble tea scoop that Alibaba just pulled off a little bit longer.

It worked like this: Anybody updating their Qwen AI app by Alibaba or recommending it to a new user got a cup of bubble tea worth 25 yuan by paying just 1 fen or about 0.001 US dollars.

300,000 tea shops all over China were overrun. The app briefly crashed. More than ten million nearly free orders worth 250 million yuan (around US$36 million) were delivered within the first nine hours.

The campaign was an immediate success. Alibaba's AI Qwen app jumped from 10th place to spot number one on Apple's app store in China for six consecutive days. Daily Active Users (DAU) of its Qwen app increased from 18.28 million to 73.52 million within a day.

While this is reminiscent of earlier "red packet" campaigns during the Spring Festival, the strategy this time was more comprehensive.

Alibaba wasn’t just promoting its app; it wanted to establish the use of agentic AI as a habit among a vast number of consumers.

The bet is that consumers are ready to move on to the third stage of the AI evolution. The first one could be called the "Q&A era" - asking a chatbot to look up information or write a text.

The second stage was about using AI tools to create presentations, summarise meeting minutes and other work formerly done by somebody at the office. The chatbots became more productive, but were still only opened when needed.

Now, the third stage has begun. AI is becoming something like a personal assistant handling all kinds of daily tasks.

Given simple voice commands, it can perform chains of tasks, calling functions in other applications and handling everything from ordering bubble tea and movie tickets to purchasing new health insurance, all the way through the payment process.

Alibaba's Vice President Wu Jia expressed the shift that happens most clearly when he said that we are moving from "AI that responds" to "AI that acts".

The exact strategy cannot be easily copied. You need an ecosystem of e-commerce sites, payment functions and access to delivery drivers comparable to Alibaba's. You need to reliably fulfil to gain the trust of consumers.

Still, how AI is moving into the orchestration and operation of business transactions is something to watch for every enterprise.

"This isn't AI as a feature bolted onto existing services. It's AI at the interface through which services become executable", commented Mark Greeven, a professor of management and innovation at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), in an article for Forbes Magazine.

Alibaba was not the only Chinese tech giant spending big during the Chinese New Year to market their new AI apps. Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance did the same.

Altogether, they spend an incredible 4.5 billion yuan on this marketing campaign in recent weeks, roughly US$650 million, according to the Chinese news portal Pengpai Xinwen (in Chinese).

The companies want to become the new "super gateways" of internet traffic in the AI era, effectively shifting the competition from parameter contests over who has the best large model to who can best monetise AI.