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AI Shopping Boom Overwhelms Alibaba's Qwen
9 Feb
Summary
- Alibaba's Qwen chatbot stopped issuing coupons due to customer overload.
- A 3-billion-yuan plan aims to boost Qwen's user base during the holiday.
- Over 10 million orders were placed in the first nine hours of the campaign.

Alibaba's artificial intelligence chatbot, Qwen, is experiencing technical difficulties. The chatbot has temporarily ceased issuing coupons due to an overload of customer requests. This campaign was designed to promote Qwen's shopping assistance capabilities beyond simple question answering.
The initiative is the first phase of a 3-billion-yuan plan to increase Qwen's user base during China's Spring Festival holiday. Since last month, Alibaba has been working to transform Qwen into a comprehensive platform, allowing users to access other apps and complete payments directly within the chatbot.
Despite the promotional goals, the rollout of Qwen's Agentic AI strategy has been hampered by technical issues. Within the first nine hours of the coupon giveaway, an astonishing 10 million orders were placed. The overwhelming volume of attempted orders over the weekend led Qwen to announce on Weibo that it was overloaded and requested users to reduce their activity.




