China’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) firms ran a series of aggressive holiday promotion campaigns around the recent Lunar New Year — handing out cars, shopping vouchers, and even cash — in an effort to rapidly grow user engagement on their AI platforms. The giveaways were tied to popular AI apps and services, turning festive promotions into a high-stakes user acquisition strategy for domestic tech giants.
One of the standout results came from ByteDance, which logged 1.9 billion interactions with its AI tools during a widely viewed New Year’s gala broadcast. At one point, the company processed an astonishing 63.3 billion tokens in a single minute — roughly equivalent to tens of billions of English words — highlighting intense interest and usage during the campaign. Meanwhile, Alibaba reported that its AI agent interface drove nearly 200 million orders, including millions of everyday purchases like 55 million cups of milk tea.
Analysts describe this approach as “commerce-as-interface” at scale, where consumer interactions with AI become directly tied to spending and daily activities rather than isolated experiments. By linking engaging giveaways with practical services — from shopping to entertainment — the promotions aimed to embed AI tools into users’ everyday lives and build long-term usage habits. However, it remains to be seen whether this surge in interaction will translate into sustained engagement and lasting consumer loyalty beyond the holiday period.
The campaigns reflect intensifying competition among Chinese tech companies to dominate the domestic AI market, leveraging cultural moments like public holidays to create familiarity and reliance on their platforms. With incentives that appeal broadly — from free products to cash rewards — firms are experimenting with marketing strategies typically seen in other tech battles (like mobile payments), attempting to make AI services central to daily online behaviour.
