Tencent connects its WorkBuddy agent to ERP and CRM systems and launches the Buddy One suite

Tencent is connecting its WorkBuddy artificial intelligence agent to enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other business platforms. The goal is for agents to move beyond personal productivity and take part in running companies. Computer Weekly reported this based on presentations at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, held in Shenzhen.

Dowson Tong, senior executive vice president of Tencent and CEO of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said these previously siloed systems can now expose Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces to WorkBuddy. He explained that an agent with the right skills and well-defined data structures can break down an analysis task, pull data from several systems at once, generate reports and present conclusions. Agents can also write to those systems. For example, a batch of reimbursement requests can be processed in one go instead of one at a time. Tong argued that companies can turn digital assets accumulated over years into resources for AI without switching systems, moving data or redesigning processes.

Tencent also unveiled Buddy One, an office suite that uses WorkBuddy as its workspace. It brings Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, the knowledge management app ima and Tencent's design tools together under a single account, with shared pools of credits and data. According to Tong, collaboration is organized around tasks rather than passing files around. A new storage service, Tencent Drive, serves as the "memory space" of the agent era. It stores the context agents accumulate and what they produce, so it can be retrieved later.

WorkBuddy also works as a bot in the sidebar of WeCom, Tencent's workplace messaging tool. Employees can assign it tasks as they would a colleague. Administrators can assign roles, token quotas and access permissions, and revoke them when someone leaves. Tencent is also opening WorkBuddy to third-party agents, to agents companies build in-house and to outside messaging systems. Tong said companies will be able to choose their own models, agents and messaging tools.

As a use case, the article cites Chinese dairy producer Yili. It combines WorkBuddy, WeCom and Tencent Cloud's Agent Development Platform (ADP) to analyze business data, generate strategies and distribute them to more than 1,000 sales advisers. According to Tong, this improved operational efficiency by more than 50%. In A/B tests, a sales adviser agent built on ADP increased orders by 26%. These figures were provided by Tencent and are not independently verified in the article.

Tong acknowledged that as agents reach production, token usage and costs soar, and there is urgency to rein them in. He proposed abandoning indiscriminate use of the most powerful and expensive models and matching each model to the right task. Tencent's TokenHub platform offers Hunyuan models via API, along with open-source models such as DeepSeek, GLM, MiniMax and Kimi, with unified billing to reduce switching costs. The full version of Hy4, the latest Hunyuan model, is coming soon, followed by a Hy4 Flash variant.

On governance, each agent receives its own identity within the company's account and permissions system. What data it accesses, which tools it calls and what it does are all logged. High-risk actions, such as deleting data, are blocked outright, and anything the system is unsure about is sent back to the user for confirmation. Tong argued that security must not give way to efficiency.

Wang Huixing, vice president and chief technology officer of Tencent Cloud, said WorkBuddy, billed as China's most widely used office productivity agent, has gone through more than 100 major versions since its launch in March. Users have completed nine billion task requests and token usage has grown 50-fold. Wang warned that individual productivity gains do not automatically carry over to the enterprise. Using agents is more like onboarding a new team that will access customer data and act on people's behalf. If permissions are not controlled and results are not verified, the impact extends to an entire line of business.

WorkBuddy's enterprise services include a security offering and an observability center that shows spending and what is gained in return. Both run on Tencent Cloud's Agent Runtime, which received a major update that week. The changes cover context management, tool calling, secure sandboxes, observability and evaluation. According to Wang, sensitive data such as phone numbers and keys are masked, filtered or blocked, and are neither passed to the model nor sent to external networks. Companies with stricter requirements can use self-hosted models, confidential computing or an edition with a virtual private cloud (VPC) and private deployment.

Internationally, Tong said Tencent Cloud's overseas business doubled its active foreign customers in a year, now spanning more than 150 countries and regions. Overseas demand for its AI services is growing at a triple-digit rate. In Indonesia, its customers include operators XLSmart and Telkomsel. It helped XLSmart complete a cloud migration in four and a half months, with more than 20 migration skills built using WorkBuddy and its coding agent CodeBuddy. Telkomsel's mini program ecosystem, which runs on Tencent's platform, doubled its monthly active users in a year. Tencent added or expanded data centers in Frankfurt, Malaysia, Mexico, Osaka, Riyadh and Thailand, and plans to expand its presence in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. According to the article, it has deployed more than two million servers worldwide. Its agent products, such as CodeBuddy, WorkBuddy, Miora and Ardot from Tencent Design, ADP and Agent Runtime, are being launched outside China at a faster pace.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, noted that WorkBuddy has more monthly active users than any other productivity tool tracked by QuestMobile, a Chinese market research firm. He praised its "harness loop for continuous accuracy," its library of skills and workflows, and its governance controls over permissions, compliance and costs. In his view, this makes it a "legitimate" complement for enterprise workloads, especially against Chinese rivals such as ByteDance's Doubao Work, Alibaba's QwenWork and Baidu's DuMate.

Su cautioned, however, that WorkBuddy still has "homework to do" in the non-Chinese enterprise market. There it faces a tough fight to displace Microsoft Office, Google Workspace and the productivity tools from the major AI labs. Tencent will have to demonstrate a solid return on investment, whether through on-premises deployment, cost transparency or data privacy and security. With no prior presence abroad, WorkBuddy must be more aggressive and work closely with channel partners. According to Su, the sooner they start, the better.