In his annual speech marking the company’s anniversary, Ma told employees this week that the industry has entered an “Age of Discovery,” comparing Tencent’s core businesses to an army and its new AI endeavours to a navy. “The army must leverage AI to maximise its efficiency, while we redeploy 50% of our personnel to the navy to support AI-native businesses,” he said, according to people with knowledge of the event.
(Nov 12): Tencent Holdings Ltd’s billionaire founder Pony Ma said he’s willing to deploy half of his troops to AI-native businesses, urging his 100,000-strong workforce to embrace an era-defining technology.
Ma’s comments came across more as a push for all employees to harness AI, rather than a sweeping overhaul, the people said. All businesses must rethink their positioning in the AI era, with half of Tencent focusing on boosting efficiency in existing operations, while the other half explores new avenues for growth, they cited Ma as saying.
Ma, 55, also called for a nimbler corporate structure with less mid-tier management, one where individual contributors could step up, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.
A Tencent spokesperson didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
China’s most valuable company is trying to close the gap with longtime rivals ByteDance Ltd and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd in AI. At stake is its future standing against a crop of fast-rising AI-native firms from DeepSeek to Moonshot, which have propelled the country to the forefront of the global AI race. Tencent recently scored an early win in enterprise AI, with its WorkBuddy desktop assistant ascending to the lead.
Ma, a reclusive founder who usually shuns the limelight, has stepped up to steer Tencent’s AI strategy. Following the breakout of DeepSeek’s R1 model in early 2025, he personally made the call to integrate it into Tencent’s flagship chatbot, Yuanbao. When autonomous agent framework OpenClaw swept China this year, Ma took to his social media feeds to promote Tencent’s competing variants.
Yet Yuanbao failed to challenge ByteDance’s Doubao as China’s biggest chatbot, and Tencent’s large language model development also fell behind. The setbacks prompted Ma to say at a May shareholder meeting that Tencent was aboard a “leaky ship.”
China has yet to witness the kind of AI-induced mass layoffs seen at Silicon Valley giants like Meta Platforms Inc and Amazon.com Inc. Yet Ma’s comments about resource reallocation have stoked some fears of job cuts on Chinese social media. As of June, Tencent reported 115,927 employees, up from 111,221 a year earlier.
It’s unclear what structural changes Tencent will pursue. Its latest companywide reorganisation took place in 2018, when it created a dedicated cloud arm that’s now the bedrock of much of its AI push. From gaming to social media and fintech, Tencent’s various departments are already experimenting with new AI businesses, and hundreds of its products have integrated its in-house Hunyuan model series.
Much of its ambitions rest on WeChat, as the ubiquitous app is testing its own native agent that can help users summarise group chats, pay bills and order deliveries.
Tencent has shed about 33% in market value this year, dropping to roughly US$470 billion as investors increasingly scrutinise the payoff of mounting AI infrastructure spending. The company is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on Nov. 18.
Uploaded by Liza Shireen Koshy
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