Beijing News tests Qwen Go! and Lingguang 2.0: personal agent competition shifts toward autonomous task handling

The Personal Agent track has suddenly become crowded. On October 27, Ant Group released Lingguang 2.0, positioned as a "personal AI assistant that can get things done," with official data showing more than 2 million downloads within six days of launch. Similarly, Alibaba's Qwen, ByteDance, and Tencent have all entered the fray.

Just two months ago, this track was nearly ignored. Overseas markets have already made the first moves: on September 8, Meta's personal agent Muse launched first in North America; on the October 21 third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg disclosed that more than 10 million users in the US and Canada had completed initial setup, with about 25% of users active daily, shopping as the core scenario, more than a quarter of users completing orders within conversations, and an average order value of over $200. On October 28, Muse landed in Singapore, integrating local services such as Shopee, Lazada, and Grab. Close behind, on September 29, OpenAI released the agent dots, now available to some subscribers starting at $100 per month.

As overseas layouts advance, domestic tech giants are following up at an even denser pace. At the Apsara Conference on September 22, Alibaba's Qwen announced it would step up its efforts in the Personal Agent direction; on October 13, it launched the personal dedicated assistant "Qwen Go!". ByteDance was reported to be deeply integrating a project codenamed Spell with Doubao, with the standalone product named "Xiaodou"; Tencent, meanwhile, is positioning itself simultaneously across three lines: cloud, desktop, and the WeChat ecosystem.

Following general-purpose large models and enterprise Agents, the competitive flames of AI giants have spread to the consumer side. Unlike past products, the core of this round of competition is no longer "smarter question-answering capability," but personal agents that can remember user preferences and autonomously handle affairs even when detached from the app foreground.

From "one-time help" to "long-term management," what personal assistants want to take over is the whole matter

On Alibaba's side, Qwen's path is to first reach into its own ecosystem. At the Apsara Conference on September 22, Qwen announced the building of continuous, personalized services for 300 million users, expanding service areas to more than 20, with over 1,000 partners applying to join the open platform.

On October 13, "Qwen Go!" made its debut. In public test cases, it identified delayed flights among multiple ticket orders, contacted the airline to seek compensation, and helped the user obtain 70 yuan in compensation; it could also scan Taobao orders to find the price-protection entry and refund a 52 yuan price difference. On October 23, "Qwen Go!" launched "My Apps," allowing users to build dedicated apps for learning, health, financial management, and other scenarios without writing code, with construction, database configuration, and deployment automatically completed by Alibaba Cloud's AI application production platform Meoo.

On October 28, a reporter from The Beijing News Shell Finance conducted a hands-on test of "Qwen Go!" and entered just one sentence in the personal intelligent assistant dialog box: "Remind me to take vitamin D every day at 8 a.m." It did not casually set an alarm and call it done; instead, it first read the specialized skill process for medication reminders, then asked for all the missing information at once—how much to take each time and how long the user planned to take it; after receiving the supplement "1 pill per day, long-term, no end date," it set up the reminder and read it back item by item for verification: remind every day at 8 a.m., 1 pill each time, long-term use. The first effective time was set for 8 a.m. on October 29, on the grounds that "8 a.m. has already passed today, so start tomorrow." "Qwen Go!" added that this was a reminder at the appointed time, not automatic purchasing or doing things on the user's behalf; it then attached a medication tip sheet. From the instruction to completion, the whole process took less than a minute, and not a single step required the user to leave the dialog box.

In its workbench, such capabilities are organized into selectable skills: daily news briefings, daily bookkeeping, invoice organization, resume customization, document translation, interview preparation, stock quote inquiries, academic paper searches, official document writing, and the creation and organization of PPTs and Excel files, with categories ranging from professional suites and financial bookkeeping all the way to Office work; users can also create their own skills.

The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter also conducted a hands-on test of Lingguang 2.0, trying to let the AI "manage money." After sending the sentence "Sort out my Alipay spending bills, find auto-renewal subscriptions I may have forgotten, and give some money-saving suggestions," it paused first: reading bills requires authorization, and the pop-up entry read "Alipay requests authorization for APASS secure connection"; one tap to confirm was all it took. After authorization was completed, it thought for more than 30 seconds and returned a bill review covering nearly half a year: the number of expenditures and the monthly average level, the real consumption scale after excluding fund flows such as transfers, red packets, and shopping credits, the fluctuations each month, and which categories the money was spent on—clothing and accessories accounted for the highest share, transportation followed closely, and dining averaged more than fifty yuan per transaction.

On the app side, the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter tested "Qwen Go!" with a request: create a weekend companion app, launch a vote on outing activities, and decide together where to go for the weekend. It did not start immediately; instead, it first explained that it would read through "the brainstorming process and HTML generation specifications before making this kind of app," and after reading, it presented a three-choice question card—delivery form (PRD document plus clickable prototype, pure front-end H5 playable version, demo prototype), additional features (real-time vote counts and result announcement, time relay, budget and splitting the bill), visual style (fresh vibrant orange-yellow, minimalist black-white-gray, retro pixel, cute doodle). It also wrote its capability boundary at the very top: "Real multi-person collaboration requires back-end services, and what I can directly deliver here is a single-file H5." After the reporter selected the pure front-end H5 and two of the additional features, generation succeeded.

An app made by the reporter using the personal intelligent assistant.

The wall between ecosystems is the hardest to tear down; the optimal strategy is a closed loop of one's own services.

ByteDance's and Tencent's choices of entry points point in the same direction—stuffing the assistant into high-frequency life scenarios. On ByteDance's side, Doubao has already been connected with Douyin Life Services: users can state their needs and get store and group-buying recommendations, complete payment, check orders, and pull up redemption codes; partners include Flight Manager, High-Speed Rail Manager, Caocao Mobility, Baidu Maps, and others.

Tencent, meanwhile, is positioning itself simultaneously across three lines—cloud, desktop, and the WeChat ecosystem: at the end of September it launched the cloud-based personal assistant LightVela, rolled out the desktop agent WorkBuddy, and its WeChat-ecosystem native assistant "Xiaowei" is in gray-scale testing, forming a multi-form personal intelligent assistant matrix. Meituan founder Wang Xing revealed at a previous earnings call that Meituan's agent "Xiaomei" will cooperate deeply with Yuanbao: when users submit local service requests in Yuanbao, they can connect seamlessly to Meituan's food delivery and delivery ecosystem.

Behind the bustle, a harder threshold is surfacing.

Before the release of its second-generation Doubao phone, ByteDance introduced the "Screen Automation Operation Declaration Protocol" (SAEP), letting app developers declare whether they accept AI acting on their behalf, and specifically defining which pages and which operations the assistant is allowed to access. When the public notice period ended on October 14, the rejection list published on the official website numbered as many as 155 apps, including WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, Meituan, Amap, Xiaohongshu, Didi, and other high-frequency scenarios. Previously, after the technical preview of the Doubao phone assistant went online, some users found that using AI to operate WeChat triggered abnormal account logout; Doubao subsequently adjusted its product capabilities and temporarily took offline operations on financial payment apps.

The same conflict has also occurred overseas. On September 20, Amazon blocked Muse from accessing its shopping site, with the official reason being "unauthorized AI agent access, failure to identify itself, and account and privacy security risks." Behind this dispute is not just a conflict at the technical and compliance levels: Amazon's total advertising revenue for fiscal year 2025 was about $68.6 billion, and this business relies on user page views and product bid recommendations; industry observers believe that personal agents bypassing the homepage and search bidding to place orders directly may shake the foundation of this advertising revenue.

A product manager for a major tech company's intelligent assistant once put it more bluntly to the media: if everyone shares permissions with a certain assistant, every app will be left with only a backend, and that is something no major manufacturer is willing to accept.

A CICC research report points out that the Personal Agent track is simultaneously facing two hard constraints: platform ecosystem walls, which determine that a cross-platform universal butler will be difficult to implement in the short term; and high computing power costs, which make an independent paid model difficult to get running quickly. Major companies prioritizing their own ecosystems is not because they do not want to build a universal assistant across all platforms, but because cross-platform permissions are difficult to obtain and inference costs remain high; at this stage the optimal strategy is to first validate transaction and usage scenarios within a closed loop of their own services.

This wall is also reshaping the playbooks of major companies. From the moves each has publicly disclosed: ByteDance's Doubao prioritizes connecting Feishu and Douyin e-commerce, aggregating shopping, travel, and other capabilities into a unified entry point; Tencent's Yuanbao is deeply bound to the WeChat ecosystem, landing through WeChat's native messaging, payment, and mini-program interfaces; Alibaba's Qwen links together Taobao, Amap, Fliggy, and Alipay resources within its ecosystem. In other words, what is being competed on at this stage is, at its core, manufacturers' ability to integrate their own ecosystems.

Veteran internet analyst Yang Huaiyu said that despite the heavy tests of ecosystem barriers and computing costs, the industry consensus remains that Personal Agent represents AI's key leap from a question-and-answer tool to proactive service. It is no longer just a dialog box passively waiting for users to ask questions, but a personal digital helper that can understand long-term needs and proactively connect multiple tasks. Once the issues of permissions, cost, and commercialization are gradually resolved, this type of agent is expected to truly reduce the burden on ordinary people in handling daily trivialities and free people from repetitive, fragmented affairs—this is also the underlying driving force behind major manufacturers' continued investment.

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