Alibaba’s consumer AI app Qianwen has extended its high‑visibility “free‑order” promotion for three more days and opened up new commerce channels, allowing users to buy movie and attraction tickets through integrations with Damai and Fliggy. The short extension runs from Feb. 14 (3pm) to Feb. 17 and broadens the scope of the app’s flagship “super free‑order card” beyond food and retail to include air and rail tickets, hotel bookings and entertainment tickets, with the cards valid until April 30.
The move is the latest escalation in Qianwen’s aggressive user‑acquisition campaign that began with a Feb. 6 launch of a mass “Spring Festival 30 billion” subsidy programme. That earlier round featured an AI feature that places orders from a single sentence and sent Qianwen to the top of Apple’s China App Store within hours; Alibaba reported tens of millions of orders in days and daily transactions measured in the millions. Qianwen now offers new users a 25‑yuan super free card on first open, and referral mechanics allow users and invitees to accumulate multiple cards, accelerating viral growth.
Beyond marketing theatre, the integrations with Damai (ticketing) and Fliggy (travel) — and prior tie‑ups with Gaode maps, Taobao, Alipay and other Alibaba ecosystem services — reveal the product strategy: stitch AI‑led convenience into an existing commerce and travel ecosystem to lock in consumer behaviour. Allowing AI to complete ticket purchases is both a convenience play and a data‑capture mechanism: more bookings routed through Qianwen create training data, repeat engagement and leverage points for cross‑selling within Alibaba.
The campaign’s usage patterns hint at broader market impact. Early data showed strong uptake in county‑level cities and among older users trying online ordering for the first time, suggesting Qianwen’s promotions are lowering barriers to digital services in lower‑tier markets. High volumes of small‑value items — milk tea, eggs, books — underline that the app is driving everyday consumer habits rather than only big‑ticket travel purchases.
That strategy carries economic and regulatory questions. The scale of the subsidies and the pace of promotional escalation raise questions about unit economics: whether the short‑term cost of free or heavily discounted orders will translate into sustainable lifetime value. Policymakers in China have recently scrutinised platform marketing practices and ticketing intermediaries, and mass subsidy campaigns could attract closer regulatory attention if they are seen as market‑distorting or misleading to consumers.
For global observers, Qianwen’s push is a test case of how large Chinese tech groups are turning generative AI from an enterprise capability into a consumer utility. If Qianwen succeeds in making AI‑driven transactions frictionless and habitual, it could reconfigure how millions of Chinese consumers discover, pay for and consume services — and give Alibaba a renewed consumer growth engine to rival rivals in the social commerce and super‑app arenas.