AI Adopted by Billions in One Chinese Spring Festival

• Doubao achieved peak throughput of 633 billion tokens during Spring Festival peak hours, demonstrating infrastructure capable of handling 100x+ normal traffic loads[1]
• Qianwen's 50 billion 'Qianwen help me' utterances in 11 days represents approximately 4.5 billion daily interactions, requiring distributed inference architecture across Alibaba's cloud infrastructure[1]
• AI search transformation embedded transaction APIs directly into LLM outputs, enabling single-step purchase completion without traditional e-commerce navigation[1]
• Qianwen reached 30+ million monthly active users within 23 days of public beta, indicating rapid adoption curve acceleration[6]
• The three-way competition created a 'divide the market into three parts' scenario where traffic entry points became the primary battleground rather than model capability differentiation[5]

The 2026 Spring Festival AI campaigns establish a new paradigm for AI adoption in emerging markets: direct ecosystem integration and habit-formation through financial incentives prove more effective than pure capability demonstrations. This suggests future AI deployment will prioritize commerce and transaction embedding over standalone applications. Goldman Sachs projects China's tech giants will spend over $60 billion on AI in 2026[2], indicating sustained competitive intensity. The achievement of 602 million generative AI users (42.8% penetration) and double-digit advertising growth signals that AI has transitioned from experimental to mainstream infrastructure status in China. The ability to reach elderly users and tier-3+ city residents demonstrates that AI adoption barriers are primarily distribution and incentive-based rather than technical or educational, reshaping expectations for global AI rollout timelines.