AI super-apps are remaking China’s internet

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.To have a coffee delivered to an office in Shanghai, simply ask one of China’s artificial-intelligence super-apps to choose a brew on your behalf, press “confirm” and the beverage will be on its way. Delegating such important decisions brings risks, of course.

When your correspondent asked one popular AI app to deliver a “special coffee”, he received a rose-petal-vinegar-flavoured one. Nevertheless, the pace with which such services are being adopted in China is remarkable.

Already more than 600m of its people are thought to have used some form of agentic app. The country is speeding towards a future in which AI chooses, purchases and delivers many of the goods and services people consume, upending its digital economy in the process.Chinese netizens have so far lived through two distinct internet eras.

From the early 2000s most turned to Baidu, a search engine, as their window to the web. When Google was forced to exit China at the end of the decade, Baidu, in effect, became a monopoly.

But as it sought to monetise its service more aggressively, ad-driven recommendations took over, leaving users disgruntled. That brought a backlash against web-based search and, thanks to the spread of the smartphone, pushed China into a second internet era dominated by mobile super-apps that bring together functions such as shopping, entertainment, communication and payments.One consequence is that China’s biggest technology firms—including Alibaba, an e-commerce titan, ByteDance, an entertainment giant, and Tencent, a gaming-and-messaging colossus—possess sprawling portfolios of digital services and logistics networks that can be used to develop agentic offerings capable of performing a wide variety of