Shenzhen (ANTARA) \u2013 Chinese technology company Tencent is targeting\nseveral Southeast Asian countries to market its artificial intelligence\n(AI) agent WorkBuddy, which can act as a personal assistant and carry\nout complex tasks for office workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have only just started offering some AI products, such as\nWorkBuddy, to Southeast Asia. There is a lot of interest in the region\nin bringing cost-effective and efficient products to market,\u201d Tencent\nSenior Executive Vice President and Chief Executive of its Cloud and\nSmart Industries Group, Dowson Tong, told journalists from several\ncountries at the company\u2019s headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong province,\non Wednesday (28 October).<\/p>\n
Tencent\u2019s WorkBuddy AI agent has been available to individual users\nin China via iOS, Android and HarmonyOS since March 2026. In Indonesia,\nthe application was launched on 14 July 2026.<\/p>\n
An AI agent is an advanced form of artificial intelligence that not\nonly answers questions but can also perform tasks automatically. While\nconventional AI \u201conly\u201d helps users think, an AI agent can help them take\naction and complete work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe product is still relatively new, so we are continuing to add\nfeatures and strengthen it for different types of workloads, for office\nworkers as well as businesses,\u201d Dowson said.<\/p>\n
He said Tencent was refining the AI agent\u2019s functions in its domestic\nmarket before taking it overseas to serve customers in multiple\nregions.<\/p>\n
\u201cParticularly in Indonesia, we have many important customers already\nusing our cloud services, big data systems and various other\ntechnologies. As a result, we have heard of very strong interest in\nadopting Tencent\u2019s AI technology,\u201d Dowson said.<\/p>\n
He said Tencent would work with partners to provide the technology,\ndrawing on their existing computing resources and seeking to bridge the\ngap between computing capacity and applications that create real value\nfor users.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are also local models that we need to integrate into WorkBuddy\nso we can adapt the product to local ecosystems and the devices popular\nin particular markets. Over the next year, we will continue expanding\nour infrastructure across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the\nAmericas,\u201d Dowson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cCapacity alone is not enough. As demand for computing, networking,\nmemory and storage grows, we must also ensure that all of these needs\nremain economically viable. That is why we continue to optimise our\nhardware and software architecture to provide more cost-effective\ncomputing and inference,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Dowson said Tencent understood that customers prioritise security and\ndo not want their sensitive data used by service providers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want the model services, agents and deployment environment to\nremain entirely under their control. That is why we have software-based\nsolutions that can be deployed on customers\u2019 own infrastructure or on\nour public cloud,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Tencent can also provide a virtual private cloud (VPC), accessible\nonly to the customer and entirely under its control.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is also demand for context encryption. We have therefore added\nfeatures to ensure that the entire model inference pathway can be\nencrypted, with cryptographic verification, so that no one can see what\nis being processed by the GPU and so on,\u201d Dowson said.<\/p>\n
In Indonesia, Tencent has worked with XLSmart to organise and support\nthe migration of systems involving more than 1,000 microservices and\nterabytes of data. The work was coordinated by a large number of AI\nagents and completed in just 4.5 months.<\/p>\n
Tencent Cloud has also worked with Indonesian ride-hailing and\ndelivery company Gojek to migrate more than 1,000 microservices to\nTencent Cloud. GoTo uses more than 50 Tencent Cloud products, including\nCloud Virtual Machine (CVM), Cloud Block Storage (CBS), Web Application\nFirewall (WAF), Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE) and Elasticsearch\nService (ES). The migration was completed in four hours and 54 minutes,\none hour ahead of schedule.<\/p>", "url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/tencent-targets-southeast-asia-with-workbuddy-virtual-assistant-1793285479", "image": "" }, "sponsor": "Okusi Associates", "sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com" }