Tencent is preparing to launch an AI-powered search engine for consumers

Tencent's WeChat Pay has launched an artificial intelligence-based robotic system in one of the 7-Eleven stores located on the company's headquarters premises in Shenzhen.

This robot first appeared in the store to celebrate the opening of the two-thousandth 7-Eleven branch in Guangdong province on October 29. The robot utilizes Tencent's Hunyuan artificial intelligence models.

Thanks to this technology, the robot can greet customers, suggest various products and promotional bundles, and assist with placing orders through dialogue. Customers then complete the payment themselves by scanning a special code.

The system is also equipped with Tencent's audio technologies, which allow it to recognize speech even in noisy retail environments. WeChat Pay stated that the goal of introducing the robot is to take over some routine customer interactions, freeing up store employees for more productive tasks such as restocking shelves, preparing food, and assisting visitors.

Tencent has made its artificial intelligence-based data analysis platform, Tencent Beacon, available to external companies and private users. Users can register on the website beacon.qq.com. Previously, Beacon was used exclusively by internal Tencent teams for self-service data analysis and visualization for about ten years.

The platform has now been completely redesigned into a comprehensive set of AI-powered data analysis tools. This allows business employees to ask questions in plain language, create dashboards, track the reasons for metric changes, configure monitoring, and collaborate without needing to write SQL code.

Tencent reports that the updated Beacon AI is used by over one hundred internal teams, including QQ Studios, Tencent Video, Tencent News, WeChat Pay, Yuanbao, and TiMi game studios. The company provided examples where an end-to-end operational dashboard, which traditionally required four to six working days in standard Business Intelligence (BI) tools, was created in less than two hours. Furthermore, a monitoring panel was completed in just eight minutes after the user opened the chat.

Beacon AI integrates with three categories and ten types of data sources. These include MySQL, StarRocks, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse databases, as well as local Excel and CSV files, and online documents from Tencent Docs, WeCom smart sheets, and Feishu. Users can tag fields as dimensions, metrics, or temporal dimensions so that the AI interprets them correctly.

When a user mentions a dataset in the chat and describes the desired outcome, the AI begins delivering results as it understands the request, matching fields, selecting charts, and displaying the dashboard. Many chart types are supported. Dashboards can be edited by pointing to an element and describing the required change, correcting the AI-generated SQL, or directly modifying the HTML dashboard, while maintaining version history and rollback capability.

For attribution purposes, users can click on an unusual chart and ask for the reason behind a numerical value change. The alerting system can trigger when thresholds are reached, data is missing, or queries fail, with notifications sent via WeCom or email. The platform comes with twelve data analysis skills and three visualization skills, supports more functions through a skill marketplace and team-created skill sets, and connects to internal knowledge bases and other systems via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

A feature called Self-Harness transforms feedback, corrections, and successful methods from past tasks into reusable experience. Regarding data security, Tencent asserts that the model only sees metadata, such as field names and data types, during reasoning. Actual values are filled via placeholders and are not read by the model, and every step is recorded in an audit log. Team spaces offer three levels of permissions, and administrators can restrict the use of AI models for team members. The enterprise version supports private deployment.

Tencent has opened up its Yuanbao search system to external developers and enterprises via the Tencent Cloud platform. Consequently, the search infrastructure previously used by the company's proprietary artificial intelligence products has been transformed into a commercial service.

This was announced on October 20th. The offered service combines publicly available web information with Tencent's proprietary content ecosystem and is designed to provide information extraction capabilities for large language models and AI agents.

Tencent stated that Yuanbao Search possesses an index containing hundreds of billions of records and processes hundreds of millions of queries daily. The system supports over 50 internal business projects, including WorkBuddy, ima, and Tencent Video.

The search engine is integrated with 157 information sources across 13 different sectors, including finance, healthcare, law, and travel. Furthermore, it provides near real-time information updates, such as for news, weather forecasts, and market prices.