Tencent WorkBuddy Tops 9bn Tasks as Hy4 Release Nears

Tencent WorkBuddy, the company’s AI agent for office work, has handled more than nine billion task requests since it launched in March, Tencent said on 29 October. The figure came at its annual Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, where it also previewed the general release of its next flagship model, Hy4, and a cheaper Hy4 Flash, without giving a date for either.

The pitch, set out in Tencent’s announcement and on X, is that models, agents and cloud capacity sold together will get companies using AI in daily work. Every number below is Tencent’s own; none has been independently checked.

In brief

Tencent says WorkBuddy has handled over nine billion task requests and is used by half of China’s 500 largest companies.
Hy4 and Hy4 Flash are “coming soon”, with visual understanding for the first time; Tencent gave no date, price or benchmarks.
Tencent Cloud says its active overseas customer base doubled in a year.

Tencent WorkBuddy’s numbers

According to Tencent, WorkBuddy is now used across more than 50 industries and by 50% of China’s top 500 enterprises. It says the agent’s ecosystem has grown to more than 50,000 developers and partners and more than 200,000 skills, the add-on abilities an agent can call on for specific jobs.

Tencent is now selling WorkBuddy to international companies. The agent links to common messaging apps and business systems, the company says, lets customers pick the AI model for each task and has built-in security controls. It has also launched CodeBuddy, the Miora and MAGIC AI products, its Agent Development Platform and Agent Runtime outside China. In China only, it introduced Buddy One, which it describes as “a cross-application collaboration system that lets WorkBuddy coordinate tasks across Tencent’s office applications and specialized business agents.”

Hy4 is coming, but without a date

Tencent says “the general release of Hy4 is coming soon”. It promises better performance on “long-horizon and real-world productivity tasks”, more efficient reasoning, and “visual understanding capabilities for the first time”. Hy4 Flash is billed as “a cost-effective model that carries over Hy4’s visual understanding and agentic capabilities”.

The release gives no launch date, pricing, model size or benchmark results. One outside data point exists: a preview version, HY4 Preview, placed in the 96th percentile among open-weight models in MLCommons’ latest AILuminate safety benchmark, as TSN reported. Business customers will reach Hy models, and third-party ones, through Tencent Cloud TokenHub, a platform with a single API for choosing models and managing usage and billing in one place.

Tencent’s Hunyuan team has been releasing smaller pieces openly for months, including the Hy-Memory 2.0 memory stack for agents and the Hy-Nomas world model. Tencent Cloud also open-sourced TeamAI, a shared harness for coding agents.

Tencent Cloud’s push abroad

Tencent Cloud says its active overseas customer base has doubled over the past year, and that its international AI business has achieved “triple-digit growth”. It now serves customers in more than 150 countries and regions, and says nine out of ten Chinese internet companies expanding abroad use it.

The customer list is weighted to Asia. Tencent says it helped Indonesian operator XLSMART move more than 1,000 microservices and is exploring work with Telkomsel and Indosat. CP AXTRA in Thailand, Kakao and Com2uS in South Korea, and Hong Kong’s Fusion Bank are also named. In Europe, it names payments firm iyzico and the e-commerce platform eMAG. New partners announced at the summit include TruKKer and OmniOps in the Middle East and Central Retail Digital, with which it is exploring AI agents for retail.

Its infrastructure grew in 2026 in Frankfurt, Osaka, Riyadh, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand, to 25 cloud regions and 70 availability zones. On the same day, Tencent announced a memorandum with Visa covering AI agent payments, another sign that agents now sit at the centre of its pitch to business.

Tencent’s figures measure activity, not revenue

This is TSN’s analysis. Nine billion task requests since March is a striking number, but it is a count of requests, not of finished work or paying users. Tencent does not say how many requests come from its own staff, from automated workflows that fire repeatedly, or from free trials. Half of China’s top 500 companies “adopting” WorkBuddy could mean a whole firm or a single team.

The overseas claims have the same gap. “Doubled” and “triple-digit growth” come without a starting point, a revenue figure or a definition of an active customer. A small base can double quickly, and Tencent does not say how much of the growth comes from Chinese firms it already serves as they expand abroad, a group it says mostly uses Tencent Cloud.

The more telling detail is the bundle. Tencent is selling an agent, a model gateway that also carries rival models, and cloud regions in markets such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico as one package. That suggests it sees agents, not the model itself, as the product that wins enterprise contracts. Hy4 will be judged on benchmarks when it arrives. WorkBuddy will be judged on whether companies outside China renew.

Until Tencent puts a date on Hy4, the clearest number in the release is the one it can count itself: nine billion requests, and rising.