On October 14, WorkBuddy was integrated into the contact list of WeCom.
In the newly launched joint version, employees can assign tasks to this AI agent just as they would send messages to a colleague. After enterprise authorization, it can access relevant messages, documents, meetings, and other work materials, then send the results back to WeCom once the task is completed.
Fifteen days later, Tencent connected WorkBuddy with more of its office products.
On October 29, at the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, Tencent officially launched its cross-application AI collaboration system Buddy One, linking the account and collaboration capabilities of office products including Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, ima, and Tencent Drive. Among them, Tencent Docs, ima, and Tencent Drive will connect to WorkBuddy's Agent technology foundation and share its task execution capabilities.
Office products that previously handled meeting communication, document editing, and knowledge management separately have begun to share the same Agent execution capability.
This shift could even affect whether some office software will still need to exist independently in the future.
Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group, told media including All-Weather Tech that if users gradually stop using the standalone version of Tencent Meeting in the future and instead become accustomed to completing meeting-related work within WorkBuddy, Tencent may at that point reconsider whether it is still necessary to maintain a standalone client.
Of course, this remains only a hypothetical scenario. Dowson Tong also emphasized that in the short term, user habits that have already formed are difficult to change, and Tencent will not deliberately push users toward another product.
But Tencent has already begun adjusting the division of labor among its office products.
This round of adjustment came after rapid growth in WorkBuddy usage. Since its launch in March this year, WorkBuddy has cumulatively completed 9 billion user task requests, with Token consumption growing 50-fold compared to the initial launch period. The enterprise edition has been deployed across more than 50 industries, covering 50% of China's top 500 enterprises and 60% of the top 100 enterprises.
As WorkBuddy gradually becomes the core of Tencent's AI office system, what Tencent needs to handle is no longer just how its own products collaborate.
On one hand, even Tencent's internal office products still have data and permission boundaries, and external enterprises are even more cautious about opening their core databases;
On the other hand, rapidly growing Token consumption and increasingly fierce market competition are also putting WorkBuddy under commercial pressure.
As Tencent further opens its capabilities to third-party Agents and developers, how existing office products participate in commercialization and how ecosystem partners share revenue will also become new issues that this round of integration must address.
Connecting Its Own Products First
Tencent is not lacking in office software.
Meetings, documents, knowledge management, enterprise communication, cloud storage, Tencent has standalone products in all these areas, and some have already accumulated a massive user base.
But even though they all belong to Tencent, when users switch between different applications, they may still need to repeatedly upload materials, organize files, and explain the work context to AI all over again.
The newly launched Buddy One first connected the account and material retrieval capabilities across these products.
After users bind a Buddy One ID for free, they can use WorkBuddy to retrieve authorized Tencent Docs, meeting records, and ima knowledge base content, and generate answers with source citations.
Tencent also unified the AI credit system for some office products. The original WorkBuddy credits were upgraded to Buddy One credits, which can be used across WorkBuddy, Tencent Docs, ima, and Tencent Drive.
A deeper adjustment took place at the technology foundation level. According to the plan announced by Tencent, products including Tencent Docs, Tencent Drive, and ima will connect to the WorkBuddy Agent foundation, calling WorkBuddy's Harness capabilities within their respective applications.
The simultaneously launched Tencent Drive is responsible for providing unified storage for different applications and Agents, allowing previously accumulated work materials and task results to continue being used in subsequent work.
Dowson Tong explained that over the past few decades, office collaboration has mainly revolved around files. Users used different editors to create documents, PPTs, and reports, then handed them to others for revision, repeatedly passing different versions back and forth.
As AI gradually takes on content generation work, this collaboration method will also change.
In his view, the previous model of repeatedly revising and passing around files will be "completely redesigned" in the AI era.
According to Tencent's vision, in the future users can directly submit requests to WorkBuddy, and the Agent will call the appropriate tools to complete tasks, while Tencent Docs, Meeting, Drive, and design products continue to provide their respective professional capabilities.
But for WorkBuddy to truly take on this work, simply connecting accounts and technology foundations is not enough.
On one hand, data access boundaries still exist between different products within Tencent.
WeCom is one example. The joint version launched on October 14 already allows WorkBuddy to access some work information from WeCom within the authorized scope. But this does not mean it can directly read all chat records.
Currently, WeCom has an independent chat record Agent to protect user privacy and prevent WorkBuddy from directly accessing other employees' chat content.
Only with sufficient authorization can the WeCom Agent exchange information with WorkBuddy.
In other words, even within Tencent, connecting different products to the same Agent system does not mean WorkBuddy can freely obtain all work context.
On the other hand, enterprise customers are even more cautious about opening their core business systems.
Previously, All-Weather Tech visited tissue paper company Zhongshun Jierou and found that although WorkBuddy has been widely used within the company, with nearly 1,300 accounts activated as of October 10, the company still has not opened its core database to it.
Zhongshun Jierou specifically established an independent data environment, allowing WorkBuddy to access only filtered data and setting different permissions based on employee identity.
Although WorkBuddy is gradually becoming an important workbench in Tencent's AI office ecosystem, it still faces two walls: information boundaries between different products within Tencent, and restrictions on external enterprises' access to core business data.
Currently, the cross-product capabilities Buddy One has achieved are still mainly concentrated in account interoperability, authorized material retrieval, credit sharing, and unified storage, while further cross-application memory sharing is still being advanced.
Tencent's rich office products and enterprise customer base provide WorkBuddy with a large number of potential context sources. But the extent to which this scattered information can be effectively called upon by the Agent is still unfinished work in this integration.
Rearranging the Pricing Model
As office products gradually integrate around WorkBuddy, Tencent has also begun rearranging its pricing model.
This time, Tencent launched the Buddy One VIP personal membership package, with a continuous monthly subscription price of 700 yuan.
This package simultaneously provides benefits including the WorkBuddy Personal Flagship Edition, Tencent Meeting Professional Edition, and Tencent Docs Super Member Plus, and includes 50,000 general AI credits per month and 1TB of shared storage space.
It is worth noting that the WorkBuddy Personal Flagship Edition previously also had a continuous monthly subscription price of 700 yuan. The main change with Buddy One this time is integrating membership benefits that originally belonged to different office products into a single subscription system.
But for the enterprise market, Tencent still faces commercialization pressure.
Dowson Tong told media including All-Weather Tech that Tencent has not yet set clear revenue targets for the WorkBuddy team, and is considering commercialization more from the perspective of supporting product and service development.
As WorkBuddy's task request volume continues to grow, model calls and computing power consumption also increase accordingly.
According to Tencent Cloud's billing rules, WorkBuddy credit consumption is jointly determined by model type, Token usage, and task complexity. The more tasks users execute and the more complex the models used, the higher the related resource consumption typically is.
For Tencent, rapidly growing usage means greater market opportunities, while also requiring continuous investment in computing resources.
Currently, Tencent has begun generating revenue through enterprise edition capabilities such as security, observability, and management.
According to Tencent Cloud's official website pricing, the WorkBuddy Enterprise Flagship Edition is priced at 198 yuan per person per month, including 2,000 credits per person per month; the Enterprise Exclusive Edition is 316 yuan per person per month.
This pricing also faces constraints from competitors. Feishu's Doubao Work Companion team subscription monthly price is also 198 yuan per seat. DingTalk launched four AI commercial versions in September this year, incorporating Qwen Office into different version benefits and granting corresponding credits based on the number of enterprise purchases.
Different products' features and credit consumption rules are not entirely consistent, but office Agents are gradually becoming part of enterprise collaboration software packages.
This means Tencent needs to prove that the task execution capabilities and enterprise-level services provided by WorkBuddy can support its independent pricing.
Whether enterprise customers are willing to continue paying also depends on the actual input-output ratio.
For example, Suning.com used WorkBuddy's observability center to analyze task execution trajectories, adjust prompts, models, and tool configurations, reducing Token consumption by 10%; H3C employees have 1.3 million conversations with WorkBuddy per day, and the management team has begun adjusting Token allocation and incentive strategies based on usage.
These cases show that as Agents become more widespread within enterprises, companies have begun to finely manage the use of AI resources.
But controlling Token consumption and how much business revenue the Agent can ultimately create for the enterprise are two different things.
For WorkBuddy, future revenue sources may not be limited to software subscriptions, but also include enterprise-level management capabilities, system deployment, and professional services provided by ecosystem partners.
But Tencent still needs to prove that these revenues can support continuously growing computing consumption and service costs.
How Far Can It Go
Tencent's office integration is not limited to its own products.
At this conference, Dowson Tong also announced that WorkBuddy will fully open its product architecture to support enterprise self-developed Agents, third-party Agents, and third-party instant messaging systems.
He stated that enterprises can independently choose models, Agents, and instant messaging tools.
Currently, WorkBuddy has already integrated with overseas collaboration tools such as Slack and Telegram. Even if enterprises do not fully use Tencent's office software, they can still call WorkBuddy within their existing systems.
These moves also make WorkBuddy's future product form increasingly clear.
For individual users, it is becoming a unified AI workbench. Products such as Tencent Docs, Meeting, and Drive still retain their independent forms, but have also begun providing callable professional capabilities for WorkBuddy.
For enterprises, WorkBuddy may further become what Dowson Tong calls an "enterprise intelligent hub."
Enterprises can connect self-developed Agents, third-party Agents, and internal business systems within WorkBuddy, organizing previously scattered intelligent agents into an Agent network capable of executing tasks across systems.
On the developer side, Tencent has already begun building a skill distribution and trading system.
Currently, the WorkBuddy open platform has gathered more than 50,000 partners and developers, with over 200,000 Skills listed.
Among them, SkillHub handles functions such as skill listing and distribution. SkillPay, launched in July this year, further connects skill invocation with payment, allowing developers and enterprises to package professional capabilities into Pay Skills charged on a per-use basis.
In this system, WorkBuddy is both the entry point for users to invoke skills and has the opportunity to become a trading channel connecting developers, enterprise customers, and third-party services.
But as more and more products provide services through Agents, existing user relationships and commercial interests may also change.
Similar problems have already begun to appear with Tencent Maps.
Tencent Maps' mapping capabilities are being opened to other Agents through MCP, Skill, and other methods.
As for the future business model, Tencent Group Vice President and President of Tencent Smart Mobility Zhong Xiangping candidly told media including All-Weather Tech that in addition to the original interface call fees, traffic commission and performance-based payment models may also emerge, but the specific model has not yet been determined.
This issue may also arise in WorkBuddy's cooperation with other office products and third-party services. As users increasingly complete work through WorkBuddy, what capabilities original products provide, how many independent entry points they retain, and how they participate in commercialization may all need to be rearranged.
Meanwhile, competition in domestic office Agents continues to heat up. Feishu has already developed multi-Agent capabilities within its existing collaboration platform, and manufacturers such as ByteDance, Alibaba, and Baidu are also continuing to expand related products.
Regarding WorkBuddy's current market position, Dowson Tong did not rush to a conclusion.
He acknowledged that WorkBuddy is indeed in a "relatively leading position," but this track has just begun, and products will still need continuous iteration in the coming years, with other manufacturers also constantly catching up.
From unifying the personal office entry point, to connecting enterprise internal Agent networks, to attracting developers to provide professional capabilities through SkillHub and SkillPay, WorkBuddy is extending toward a more complete Agent ecosystem.
However, these three levels of development are not synchronized.
For individual users, Tencent has already begun integrating its office products; for enterprises, access to core business systems is still limited by data and permission boundaries; for developers, although skill distribution and charging mechanisms have been established, whether they can form a sustained transaction scale remains to be seen.
Tencent has already built a framework for WorkBuddy connecting products, enterprises, and developers.
Next, what determines how far this ecosystem can go is not only how many tools WorkBuddy can call, but also how much business enterprises are willing to open to it, and whether the products and developers providing capabilities can obtain sustained returns from it.
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