今年夏天，当马化腾将腾讯控股有限公司的AI业务称为“一艘漏水的船”时，这位亿万富翁创始人在这家多年来凭借微信称霸行业的公司中引起了波澜。这家社交媒体与游戏巨头当时正努力在后ChatGPT时代追赶DeepSeek等同行。他的核心副将之一汤道生给出了一个令人意外的答案：让我们进行调整，将重点转向企业业务。
When Pony Ma called Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s AI endeavor “a leaky ship” this summer, the billionaire founder sent ripples through a company that for years dominated the industry with WeChat. The social media and gaming leader was at the time struggling to catch the likes of DeepSeek in the post-ChatGPT age. One of his key lieutenants, Dowson Tong, came up with a surprising answer: let’s retool to focus on businesses.
这位硅谷老兵将扭亏为盈的努力集中在了一款名为WorkBuddy的产品上，该产品当时被视为腾讯庞大互联网业务中的一个副业。到了秋天，这款类Claude Cowork的AI助手将公司现有的即时通讯和办公工具与能够获取数据并生成报告的AI智能体结合在了一起，月活跃用户达到了3200万——超过了其竞争对手的总和。该平台将腾讯推入了利润丰厚的AI细分市场，这是重获其科技信誉的重要第一步。
The Silicon Valley veteran focused the turnaround effort on something called WorkBuddy, then considered a side project within Tencent’s sprawling internet portfolio. By the fall, the Claude Cowork-style AI assistant, which combined the company’s existing messaging and office tools with AI agents that can take data and crank out reports, served 32 million monthly users — more than its rivals combined. The platform launched Tencent into a lucrative segment of AI, an important first step toward regaining its tech credibility.
汤道生现在是腾讯仅有的几位核心高管之一，他们正带头开展一场高风险的冲刺，以缩小与TikTok母公司字节跳动有限公司以及长期竞争对手阿里巴巴集团控股有限公司的差距。关乎生死的是腾讯在面对从DeepSeek到月之暗面等一批迅速崛起、将中国推向全球AI竞赛前沿的AI原生企业时，未来的行业地位。这位出生于香港的高管本周在深圳接受彭博新闻社采访时表示，WorkBuddy的崛起标志着腾讯的转变，即至少在初期阶段，将重点放在企业智能体而非消费者聊天机器人上，以便更好地从这项新兴技术中实现商业化。
Tong is now one of just a handful of key Tencent executives spearheading a high-stakes push to close the gap with TikTok-parent ByteDance Ltd. and longstanding rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. At stake is Tencent’s future industry standing against a crop of fast-rising AI-native firms from DeepSeek to Moonshot AI, which’ve propelled the country to the forefront of the global AI race. WorkBuddy’s ascent signals a shift by Tencent to focus on enterprise agents rather than consumer chatbots, at least in the early phases, so it can better monetize an emerging technology, the Hong Kong native told Bloomberg News in Shenzhen this week.
“这是一个诚实的评估，”53岁的汤道生在谈到老板坦率的评价时说道。“腾讯的优势在于我们有纠正航向的能力。如果我们第一次尝试没有成功，并且我们认识到这是一场马拉松，我们就会进行第二次尝试。”在抵达深圳二十年后——当时几乎不会说普通话——汤道生正协助腾讯在与全球一些最具创新力的AI企业的竞争中指引方向。
“It was an honest assessment,” Tong, 53, said of his boss’s frank comment. “Tencent’s advantage lies in our ability to correct course. If our first attempt doesn’t succeed and we recognize this as a marathon, we make a second attempt.”Two decades after arriving in Shenzhen — barely able to speak Mandarin — Tong is helping guide Tencent in that competition against some of the world’s most innovative AI firms.
在一个大多数人习惯于低成本甚至免费数字服务的国家里，中国的AI先锋们正艰难地将数十亿美元的投资转化为可持续的利润。然而，来自投资者的压力正在不断增加——腾讯今年的市值已经缩水了36%，降至约4500亿美元。正因如此，曾在职业生涯早期就职于甲骨文公司的汤道生，将目光锁定在了资金更雄厚、追求可靠性的企业客户身上。
In a country where most people are used to low-cost, often free digital services, China’s AI pioneers struggle to translate billions of dollars of investment into sustainable profits. Yet the pressure from investors is growing — Tencent has shed 36% of its value this year to around $450 billion. That’s why Tong, who worked at Oracle Corp. early in his career, lit on deeper-pocketed corporate customers seeking reliability.
转折点出现在今年年初，诸如OpenClaw等自主智能体架构开始在中国用户中获得关注。腾讯迅速推出了自己的变体。由内部编程工具开发而来的WorkBuddy在字节跳动和阿里巴巴做出反应之前，就抢占了萌芽中的企业级AI市场。汤道生推动了那项内部决策，即委托小型、灵活的团队去试验产品——正是这套自下而上的运作手册，在腾讯二十年的历史中创造了其一些最大的社交媒体和游戏爆款。
The turning point came when autonomous agent architectures such as OpenClaw began to gain traction with Chinese users at the start of this year. Tencent quickly launched its own variants. WorkBuddy — developed from an internal coding tool — captured a nascent enterprise AI market before ByteDance and Alibaba could respond. Tong drove that internal decision to entrust small, nimble teams to experiment with products — the same bottom-up playbook that produced some of the company’s biggest social media and gaming hits over its two-decade history.
“在最初阶段，少数人只是简化了界面，并针对一般办公工作而非开发人员的任务对其进行了优化，”他说道。“但当我们看到强烈的口碑和不断攀升的容量需求时，我们稳步加大了投资。”汤道生凭借类似的绝地反击押注建立了自己的职业生涯。在硅谷度过早期职业生涯后，他于2005年被腾讯总裁刘炽平招募，两人是密歇根大学的同校校友。他从腾讯最早的产品QQ开始做起，并协助将其扩展到博客和移动服务领域。
“At the very beginning, a handful of people simply streamlined the interface and optimized it for general office work rather than developer tasks,” he said. “But when we saw strong word-of-mouth and capacity requirements climbing, we steadily ramped up our investment.”Tong has built a career on similar comeback bets. After spending his early career in Silicon Valley, he was recruited in 2005 by Tencent President Martin Lau, a fellow University of Michigan alumnus. He started on Tencent’s earliest product, QQ, which he helped expand into blogging and mobile services.
2018年，他接掌了一个新成立的业务集团，提供亚马逊云科技风格的云平台，比华为技术有限公司和阿里巴巴落后了多年。该公司在视频流媒体和游戏领域的统治地位帮助其云业务争取到了最初的客户，汤道生还押注了视频会议，将一个内部工具改造成了腾讯会议，该软件在疫情封锁期间大受欢迎。
In 2018, he took the helm of a newly-formed business group to offer Amazon Web Services-style cloud platform, lagging years behind Huawei Technologies Co. and Alibaba. The company’s dominance in video streaming and gaming helped it court initial clients for its cloud business, and Tong also bet on video conferencing, transforming an internal tool into Tencent Meeting, whose popularity surged during pandemic lockdowns.
所有这些投资开始让腾讯的财务状况承压。尽管其人工智能支出远未达到Meta平台公司等美国主要科技公司的水平，但该公司在截至6月的季度中，自由现金流转为负值。在此期间，腾讯的资本支出大幅增加了约180%，达到约80亿美元。
All that investment is starting to stretch Tencent’s finances. While its AI spending is nowhere close to the level of major US tech firms such as Meta Platforms Inc., the company’s free cash flow turned negative in the quarter ended in June. Tencent hiked its capital expenditure by about 180% during the period to about $8 billion.
腾讯仍然决心将人工智能整合到其核心业务中——Meta在Instagram和Facebook上成功推出Muse，向整个行业展示了人工智能触及现有用户群体的潜力。这家中国公司目前拥有超过10亿的用户，他们使用微信进行交流、与商家做生意以及玩游戏。
Tencent remains intent on integrating AI into its primary businesses — Meta’s successful launch of Muse across Instagram and Facebook showed the industry the potential for artificial intelligence to reach an existing user base. The Chinese firm today counts more than a billion people who turn to WeChat to communicate, do business with merchants and play games.
然而，汤道生指出，早期的努力并未完全奏效。2025年，马化腾亲自下令将该公司的旗舰聊天机器人——元宝——与DeepSeek的开源权重模型进行整合，希望这家人工智能新星能够弥补腾讯落后的专有混元系统。元宝随后被直接嵌入到微信中。
Tong however noted that early efforts haven’t exactly stuck. In 2025, Ma personally ordered the integration of the company’s flagship chatbot — Yuanbao — with DeepSeek’s open-weight models, in the hope that the AI upstart could supplement Tencent’s lagging proprietary Hunyuan system. Yuanbao was subsequently embedded directly into WeChat.
但元宝未能取得成效。相反，字节跳动的豆包巩固了其作为中国最受欢迎的类ChatGPT应用程序的领先地位，日活跃用户数超过1.8亿，并将最初的一批用户转化为付费订阅者。
But Yuanbao failed to deliver. Instead, ByteDance’s Doubao cemented its lead as China’s most popular ChatGPT-style app, surpassing 180 million daily users and converting an initial cohort into paying subscribers.
“我确信我们会找到一种方法让经济效益行得通，”他说。汤道生承认，一个关键的未解问题是，推理成本（托管人工智能服务的费用）何时才能下降到足以让元宝这样的消费级产品维持盈利的程度。
“I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to make the economics work,” he said. A key open question is when inference costs — the expense of hosting AI services — will fall enough for consumer products like Yuanbao to sustain profitability, Tong acknowledged.
伴随着仍在测试中的微信原生智能体，元宝依然是腾讯开发一款最终能与TikTok或腾讯自家超级应用相媲美的人工智能应用的主要试验田。童映瀚表示，腾讯也对探索新形式持开放态度，并指出Meta的Muse个人智能体是一个可行的蓝图。
Along with WeChat’s native agent, which is still in testing, Yuanbao remains a primary testbed for the company to develop an AI application that will ultimately rival TikTok or Tencent’s own superapp. Tencent is also open to exploring new formats, with Tong pointing to Meta’s Muse personal agent as a viable blueprint.
童映瀚称，现在当公司的最高高管每两周聚会一次、大约十来个人一起交谈时，人工智能占据了议程的一半以上。他与姚顺郁也保持着紧密联系，后者从OpenAI加入腾讯以重组混元的发展。腾讯的下一代混元4代模型计划于年底前亮相，为又一次重大试验奠定基础。
Now when the company’s top executives convene every two weeks, roughly a dozen of them conversing together, AI commands more than half of the agenda, Tong said. He also maintains close contact with Yao Shunyu, who joined from OpenAI to revamp Hunyuan’s development. Tencent’s next-generation Hy 4 model is slated to debut by year-end, setting the stage for another big trial.
童映瀚表示，公司并非行动迟缓，而是在为一场持久战做准备。“谁能保证每个项目都能一击中的？”
The company isn’t slow, but simply bracing for a long fight, Tong said. “Who can guarantee that every single project hits the bullseye on the first shot?”