Alibaba’s flagship consumer-facing AI application, Qwen App, is opening its agentic capabilities to external partners for the first time, beginning with today’s partnership with China Eastern Airlines to build a broader ecosystem around consumers’ everyday needs.
The integration extends Qwen App’s agentic capabilities across the airline’s full suite of consumer services. Users can now seamlessly manage the full airline travel process, from search and ticketing to seat selection and check-in, within a single chat in the app, removing the need to juggle multiple platforms.
Jia Wu, President of Qwen App, said, “Expanding from the strong momentum within the Alibaba ecosystem, integrating China Eastern marks the first time our agentic capabilities are available to external partners, making everyday life easier for even more users with new use cases.”
This one-stop experience is built around natural-language intent. Rather than navigating rigid menus across digital platforms, users can ask Qwen App to “find the cheapest China Eastern direct flight” or “pick a spacious seat with a good view,” letting the AI handle the entire transaction with recommended options based on budget or travel context.
Beyond agentic execution, the Qwen App is evolving into a proactive intelligent companion that anticipates user needs. By monitoring common travel friction points in real time, such as real-time traffic and flight status, Qwen App will act before a need arises. It can calculate the commute time to the airport and proactively offer to book a car based on real-time traffic conditions. The result is a journey where travelers can focus on the trip itself while the AI manages the logistics behind the scenes.
“Traditional menu-driven interfaces constrain how people express what they actually want,” Wu added. “AI naturally lets users articulate their needs freely, which will generate entirely new kinds of demand and services.”
The China Eastern partnership marks the first step. There are also plans to extend the integration to the airline’s loyalty and membership services, and to combine Qwen App’s flight capabilities with ridehailing, hotels and other services for end-to-end trip planning. The Qwen App will continue to add partners both within and outside the Alibaba ecosystem to expand its agentic use cases. With each new integration, the Qwen App aims to embed AI more seamlessly in the daily lives of Chinese consumers and sharpen its competitive advantage in applied AI.
This partnership follows Qwen App’s successful integration of the everyday services within the Alibaba ecosystem, which had drawn more than 140 million users to its AI-driven shopping experience by February. During this year’s Chinese New Year campaign, AI-facilitated travel bookings on Alibaba’s platforms surged over 800%, with attraction tickets up 24-fold, signaling a rising demand for AI-driven trip planning.
